


Paradigm Shift

by Kayndred



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Altean Shiro, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Keith is a shy kitty, M/M, Magic-Users, Magical Realism, Magical Trauma, Mentions of Alfor, Mentions of Lotor, Political Prisoners, Politics, Sheith Secret Santa 2016, Slow Burn, Speciesism, Worldbuilding, but like super late because it JUST DIDN'T WANT TO END, magical transformations, mentions of Allura, the slowest burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2017-01-30
Packaged: 2018-09-18 12:19:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9384758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kayndred/pseuds/Kayndred
Summary: When Katie gets a tutor for transmutation she doesn't think it's going to be a big deal - and then Keith Kogane shows up and everything gets turned on its head, mostly because resident Altean dad-friend Takashi Shirogane gets caught in his violet eyes and doesn't exactly want to get out. But when Keith proves himself to be more than just a genius magician, it's not just Katie's worldview that gets rearranged.Can Keith's secret help fix a mistake from Shiro's past that haunts him at every moment? Will Katie pass transfiguration without blowing up the practice lab? Will Matt's major adviser ever return fromwarvacation?





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is the story that would. Not. End. no matter what I tried (66 pages on word what is my life). I am so, so sorry that this took so long, and I know I've been saying that I'd be posting it for about a month and a half, intermittently, but here it is! *sad confetti* I hope some part of this makes up for its lateness. It was immensely fun to write, and there are still things in this that I want to expand on a lot, but it's basically the end of January, and enough is enough. Merry (very, very, very late) Christmas flufflyneko! You had really inspiring prompts, even though it took me forever to make them a reality.

“And the nightmares are getting worse again?” His counselor asks, peering over their glasses. The light from the gentle ghost lights of the office outlines them an egg yellow, too close to one of the colors that haunts Shiro’s nightmares, but if he looks away - looks just to the side, out of the corner of his eye - well, the center of the ghost lights is barely a shade above sepia, and the edge of it glows white. There are so many of the lights that sometimes Shiro can see an outline of a person pass by. It adds a strange disconnect that Shiro isn’t sure he appreciates. It’s fascinating, to be sure, but…

He has enough of his own ghosts stalking his steps, thanks.

“Yes.” He says, and the counselor hums in consideration, marking something down in the file that has been just as persistent as his ghosts for ten years.

Numb with the repetition of it all, Shiro watches the ghost lights at an odd angle, the figures gliding fuzzily past.

.x.

It’s afternoon by the time Shiro makes his way back to Matt’s, the sky a pure, crystalline blue, cloudless, clean. It’s been a good week, weather-wise. Many of his classes have taken to conducting lessons outside to take advantage of the warmth and the clarity before winter sinks its teeth in.

Shiro’s summer session is light, even for a senior, and even though classes aren’t out for the college yet he knows his best friend will be home. Matt, slaving away over his research, only has classes and section during the middle of the week.  _I don’t believe in Mondays_ , he’d said, years ago, when he and Shiro were young and dumb. It’d been one of the things that had held over, even after everything.

Matt didn’t believe in Mondays.

Shiro could sympathize, what with his therapy sessions increasing with the start of the year.

The Holt house is a charming two story with a porch that completely encases it, the paint turned light blue with sun damage and age, its once cream trim and railing bleached white. Shiro knows that it’d be an easy fix with a handful of spells, but Matt’s mother has always liked the appeal of a house showing its years, although he has no real idea why. The weather vane at the peak of the second story hisses at him in welcome - a cockatrice made from stained glass, Shiro has somewhat fond memories of trying to levitate it down from the roof with Matt in eighth grade, sure that it would be able to turn rocks in the yard into precious stones.

He whistles back at it, smiling when it ruffles its feathers at him and stalks across the roof, as taciturn as any cat.

Shiro doesn’t soften his steps even across the squeaky boards that lead up to the porch, or charm away the noise of the door when it swings open. Matt is in the living room, folded almost completely in two over his books on the coffee table and surrounded by a rainbow of highlighted papers, and doesn’t notice either way.

He putters around in the adjacent kitchen, one ear tuned toward the level above them, the other on the grumpy sounds of Matt a room over, the scrape of paper over paper, the rasp of his highlighters as he pulls bits and pieces of his research project into existence. Shiro’s tea brews in hot silence while Matt mumbles to himself about  _the continuity of the circle_ and  _time overlap_ and all sorts of things that sound vaguely like the marriage of runes and botany.

“Making progress?” Shiro asks, coming back into the living room with his steaming mug. Matt lets out an incredulous wheeze. There are spots of color on his face that correspond to a heavily highlighted pamphlet, and Shiro wonders if he fell asleep on it or just spent several long minutes debating his life choices.

“If by progress you mean piecing together a threadbare pile of  _ideas_ and  _hopes_ , and praying that they’ll hold together when I stitch them through with a phenomenal amount of bullshit,” Matt drops his head onto the table, right on top of his fresh green highlight, “then yes. Progress.” His last words are muffled in the papers.

Shiro laughs, weaving around Matt’s piles of paper to get the last clear seat on the couch. He flicks his fingers over the tea, cooling it to an acceptable level so that he can drink it, only to have Matt swipe it away immediately after, downing it all in one long gulp.

Matt laughs at Shiro’s incredulous face for what feels like forever, his face red with it even as Shiro summons more tea from the pot. His cup fills with a soft hiss, and this time he draws a rune on it against theft. “Rude.” He says, and Matt sticks his tongue out.

Shiro asks about Matt’s research, sending him on a tirade about rune enhancements and layering and the fine line between rune shapes - “Shiro you don’t get to take circles for granted anymore, okay, like, do you understand that when you marry the transmutation signs and the alchemy diagrams they have  _angles_ and those angles  _impact rune formation?_ ”

Shiro lets it all wash over him, smiling and responding almost on autopilot. Matt’s enthusiasm about runes had started early, and by now he’s used to the tangents and the flurry of arguments and counter-arguments Matt comes up with for himself. Matt’s elemental bond to water makes rune work a particularly difficult for him, runes being a solid-state magic and water being a particularly slippery medium to channel.

“Katie still in class?”

“Pff - barely.” Matt snorts, leaning back to stretch his shoulders on the couch. “She keeps coming home early to practice her advanced spell casting homework. Her trig class is too easy, apparently. But whatever.”

That explains the lack of the noise from the upstairs, at least - Katie took her big experiments to the basement when she was ten and the noise from her alchemical explosions kept Matt up during finals. Shiro remembers that period fondly, if only because Matt had, for once, looked as harried as Shiro during exams.

Katie’s grown since, of course - there are silencing spells and double dampeners on all the rooms she uses for any of her school projects - but there’s still a very high chance that any magic she decides to practice ends up exploding. It’s her specialty.

Neither of her friends are particularly good at grounding that either, Shiro thinks, pulling out his phone and pulling up his assignment lists. Katie’s ‘agemates’ and chosen companions are two first year boys who are definitely more into magical explosions than they are into doing their homework. Hunk is an earth bond, like Katie, while Lance is a water bond, and although all three of them are in the top of their studies, none of them have the magical refinement that’ll help curb the more dramatic reactions their new magics create.

“They down there now?” He asks, scrolling through his assignments, organizing. Matt’s about to answer when the house gives a shudder, smells briefly of citrus, and then the spells layered over the building kick in, and the air is clear again. 

“That answer your question?” Matt laughs.

.x.

There’s a distinct scent of tangerines fills Katie’s nose a half a second before the cauldron gives a shudder and then a  _heave_ , one that she’s sure Matt can feel, and then the whole room is filled with the tangerine smell, and a cloud of greenish orange besides.

“ _Sheeit!_ ” Comes Lance's voice followed by a thick cough. “Katie what’d you  _do?_ ”

“What I said would happen!” That's Hunk, wand alight and siphoning the cloud away by the stairs. Katie can feel him gearing up for a good, long worry-rant from eight feet away.

“You put your casting too far outside the parameters of alchemy without a spell-net, and  _then_ ,” she can see his face now, worry lines making him look like a grumpy puppy, “ _then_ you dropped completely unstable elements on it! What did you expect?”

“Fireworks?” Asks Lance, appearing out of the smoke on her opposite side. He has an air bubble paradigm cast around his head, his hair drifting slightly in the magically manifested current.

Katie sighs, banishing the smoke around her cauldron and activating the air filtration spells in the room with a flick of her wrist. The liquid in the iron pot, previously a pale violet with the consistency of water, bubbles and spits, jell-o thick. The basement lights make it an ugly bruise green.

“I am  _not_ taking off my bubble until that shit is gone.” Lance declares, waving his wand at it. Whatever attempt at a cleaning spell he casts, intentionally or not, just gets absorbed by the ooze.

Katie pushes her goggles up into her hair, waving a few banishment runes into place around the cauldron. “That's science, boys. Help me put some of this in vials for the archive before I purge this junk.”

Lance and Hunk grumble but oblige, summoning gloves and several test tubes while Katie arranges the volatile waste disposal unit, reaffirming that the security and containment spells are in place. She reinforces the runes along the sides, just to be sure, and they glow pale green against the established magic network.

“Ready?” She asks, drawing the transportation rune with several quick flicks. It hovers before her, a white rune on white paradigm, suspended in white lines.  

“Please don't blow it up again.” Hunk says, levitating his vials. The ooze glitters now, the smooth crystal of the vials catching the light, and outside of the cauldron she can see the layers, the pits and striations.

“ _Please blow it up again._ ” Lance whispers, a grin splitting his face.

Katie laughs, and whips a sparkler spell into existence just for kicks.

.x.

“Professor Kamina says you're approved for fall quarter once summer session ends.” Matt says over dinner that night, gathered around the kitchen table. Katie hums a confirmation from her spot between Lance and Hunk, cheeks full of peas. “Do you have your courses picked out?”

“Does she ever!” Lance pipes up. Hunk gets a hand over his mouth before anyone can get too familiar with partially chewed food, and Shiro is thankful.

“She's got three different schedules depending on class availability.” Hunk explains. “And she's fitting two extra classes in just because she's finally allowed to teleport on campus.” Katie makes another affirmative noise, grinning victoriously around her fork, and Lance steals part of her ham. Shiro smiles into his potatoes, purposefully pretending not to see the slapping and obnoxious looks that passes between the three. At his side, Matt coughs into his hot cocoa and looks away.

Ridiculous and adorable, the three of them.

“So, you probably  _won't_ be seeing me around school,” she laughs, successfully stealing back a part of Lance’s ham.

Shiro laughs along with her, imagining the flash of Katie’s teleportation outside advanced rune making or calculus; thinks about how strange it'll be to know one of the smartest and probably the youngest students on the roster and never be able to  _see_ her.

“Maybe we’ll have a class together.” He says, and that sends Hunk off on a spiel about probabilities and class sizes relative to career trends - and did he mention he hated his stats class? And Shiro laughs, hearty and real, and for a moment, forgets.

.x.

Classes for the new quarter start with a bang - literally, in Katie’s case.

Transfiguration is not her strong suit,  _at all_ , and it’s a good thing that everyone is used to casting quick defense paradigms in response to sudden noises and explosions, otherwise there would be a lot more than just a couple burned tables in her lab.

She’s resigned herself to staying after a lot this quarter, likely for detention, equally likely to pay for fines, or to receive bills for damaged equipment, or just to be scolded. It’d been common in upper high school, too, Katie and her parents, or a parent, or Matt, sitting in the principal's office, being reprimanded.

“Miss Holt,” Professor Haggar says, fingers steepled beneath the long sleeves of her robe. Professor Haggar reminds Katie distinctly of a desert lizard, with her pale yellow-on-yellow eyes and the sharp beak of her nose. Her skin looks paper thin and drawn too tight across her cheeks. Complex runes in circular layers turn her head and shoulders into a complex lattice of faded tattoos, most too small or too old for Katie to read. Her office is a spartan place, with immaculate bookshelves and impeccably arranged papers and files. Katie doesn’t realize why, at first, until a folder drops from the ceiling and right into a wire tray. She can’t read the tab on it, but she can see the faint tracks of spellwork that shine on the ceiling right after.

Professor Haggar is either almost entirely blind or exceptionally meticulous, or both, she realizes. Every item has a string of magic or a track of origin, like outlines and arrows drawn in marker across the whole room. She can read the spellwork in them, too - files called to return to trays, trash charmed to stay in bins, books with alphabetized tethers. Katie had known, of course, that magic was used far more regularly and casually in the collegiate sphere, but she hadn’t realized how much like a  _home_ it meant making a place.

Katie comes back to herself with a jolt, realizing she’s been gazing around at Professor Haggar’s room and not paying attention to anything, but her Professor doesn’t say anything about it - she just continues to gaze unnervingly at Katie, like a strange statue.

“You have remarkable talent, Miss Holt,” she says, startling Katie. “There are very obvious reasons why you have been moved so quickly through your school years. You have a vast well of magic, and your mind is a phenomenon of possibility. You see chances where others see walls, and you have the ingenuity and the determination to see your ideas come to fruition.”

This is a conversation Katie has had before - often repeatedly from the same teachers, increasingly with more and more exasperation.

“However,” Professor Haggar continues, and this - Katie isn’t quite used to this. “Your refinement is… subpar, is a polite term.” Haggar’s face is neutral and cool. “Likely due to your rapid movement through the ranks of your schoolmates, and the inability of your teachers to handle your power.”

Haggar presses her fingers against a thin stack of papers in front of her, gaze drifting down and then back up again, just a tick.

“I’ve decided to assign you a tutor for the duration of the year.” Haggar says, expression unchanging. Shock shoots through Katie, confusion drawing her face into a frown. “He’s an advanced student as well, and has been moving forward through his classes with relative ease this summer - as his advisor I am confident that tutoring you will not interfere with either of your projected curricula.”

“Is he in our transfiguration class?” Katie asks. It would be hard to explain to someone who hadn’t been there exactly what she’d done wrong - it’d been so fast, and her containment field had fallen so suddenly - she shivers. Just thinking about it made her stomach twist in knots.

Professor Haggar nods. “Keith Kogane is your teaching assistant.”

Katie feels like her heart has stopped.  _Keith Kogane?_

She remembers him from the class that day - red turtleneck, hair back in a short ponytail, wireframe glasses sliding down his nose while he read or transcribed Haggar’s lecture or whatever it was that he’d done. Keith Kogane was a prodigy, halfway through the graduate programs at Arus U at twenty-one and a phenome at transmutation and alchemy. There were rumors that he was even bonded to fire, although Katie had never heard of anyone who’d actually seen him do any elemental magic.

She’d never actually  _seen_ him though. It was hard to reconcile the image of the turtleneck and glasses wearing man who’d only nodded when Professor Haggar had introduced him to the class, with the delinquent fire-breathing genius that seemed to haunt the halls of any magical high school in a hundred miles.

“Are you sure that’s okay?” She doesn’t want to seem ungrateful - Keith is at the top of his class, after all - but she’s pretty sure she could get an average tutor and not some genius.

Haggar’s eyelids lower very briefly, and Katie  _thinks_ she sees her smile. “Certainly.” One of her thin, claw-like hands escapes the folds of her sleeves just as a pen coasts over to her. She signs a paper that pulls itself from the stack on her desk, the pen moving with a flourish. It flutters over to Katie’s waiting hands, and she sees that it’s a permission form, a course number and a series of dates - tests. Katie feels like the oxygen in the room has been sucked away, and when she looks up at Professor Haggar she looks like the ghost of concern has passed over her.

“Katie. Dear,” it’s so strange hearing endearments from Haggar. She looks like she’s not completely used to it either. “You are a very bright magician. One of our brightest, in at least a decade. You’ve been tested extensively, and you make intuitive magical leaps that few will be able to keep up with, that would likely frustrate a standard tutor.” She reaches one withered hand toward Katie, like she might reach forward and calm her, like a startled animal. “You require a mental equal, someone who can follow the dots you connect and the strides you take. Kogane can do that for you.”

She breathes deeply through her nose for a few moments, careful to keep her grip loose, to not wrinkle the paper. Her mind is racing, imagining all the possibilities that will open up before her - moving through her time at Arus at an excelled pace, graduating early, moving into the Advanced Magical Technologies field or graduate school, maybe both.

“You said the year?” She asks, voice faint. Keith Kogane, tutor for a year?

Professor Haggar looks relieved at her composure and her hand draws back into her sleeves. The strange, dual yellow of her eyes unnerves Katie, but there’s something in her look that reminds Katie of a big cat watching something interesting, analyzing.

“Yes.” She replies. “Kogane has only a few classes left on his curriculum, and the duration of his stay will likely match yours, within a few weeks.” Her attention slides to the door, and, as if on cue, a knock sounds on the wood. “Come.” Haggar calls, and Keith Kogane enters, looking as neutral and impassive as anything.

“Miss Holt is considering accepting your tutelage this year.” Professor Haggar says. “She worries over an imposition on your time.” There’s something strange in the professor’s voice, something equal parts familiar and stilted - if it were anyone else, Katie would think that Haggar didn’t quite know how to talk to Keith.

Behind his glasses, Keith looks at her, his eyes intent but… distant. Katie doesn’t feel like  _Katie_ , looking at him, being looked at by him, watching him watch her. She doesn’t know what she feels like, but it’s not comfortable. It’s strange.

“No imposition.” He says eventually, violet eyes flickering away, to Haggar, then back. “My schedule is free, except for the times on the paper.” He nods toward her schedule. “We can negotiate around your exams, and around holidays.”

He doesn’t  _look_ enthusiastic, but Katie has the distinct impression that Keith doesn’t look enthusiastic about a lot of things, least of all more coursework.

Katie looks to Professor Haggar, who has the faintest smile on her face, and it takes a beat to realize it’s because of the excitement on Katie’s own face.

“Okay.” She says, excited. “Okay.”

.x.

 _“I’ve got a tutor.”_ Katie says, her voice muffled in the phone. Matt has it on speaker, but it’s face up on the counter and the speaker’s pressed against the tile.  _“I’m bringing him by tonight - I’ve got a transfiguration project due for next week.”_

“He can stay for dinner then.” Matt says, flicking his wand through a series of cleaning charms and a cooking enchantment. They write themselves through the air, quick as cursive and just as looping, the color of glacier ice. “Shiro’s bringing his cousin over, Allura? She’s speaking at a symposium or something, so she’s staying with him.”

There are rustling noises from the other end of the line, and Katie sighs,  _“You know one of my favorite things about Shiro is that he doesn’t do the human-Altean comparisons thing, you think his cousin will be the same?”_

Matt hums, thinking. He knows Shiro’s very unique in his status Altean, but not as strangely aloof or ‘touristy’ - Katie and Lance’s term - as many of the others are.

Even after over a thousand years of integration, there was still something entirely ‘other’ about most Alteans, something foreign and new and strange. It was more than just a clash of cultures, Matt thought. It was more than two people from different places interacting from entirely different points of view. It was like Matt’s lizard brain knew something he didn’t, and Alteans were that thing. Some ancient, magical part of him, the part that magical anthropologists and geneticists and historians had been trying to link to the fae for years - that part of him recognized something that couldn’t be put into words.

He saw it in Shiro, too, even after knowing him for over a decade, through thick and thin and all the awkward growth places in between. It was more than what Matt could  _see_ , too, more than the pointed ears, than the faded marks below his eyes, than the crystalline construct of his wand. It’s like if humans and Alteans were on a scale of magic, Alteans would be a handful of steps closer to that magic than humans.

Somehow, he figured, that was what made Alteans so  _fascinated_ in humans, and humans so equally fascinated in them.

“I don’t think she will be.” He says, watching vegetables peel themselves. “She’s an ambassador's daughter, she’s got at least a little diplomacy, or else she wouldn’t be speaking.”

 _“Hmm.”_ There’s more rustling from Katie.  _“I can see that. Alright, expectations eliminated. What has he said about her.”_

Not much, admittedly, but Matt tells her all he can.

.x.

Keith likes Katie Holt’s house, at least the outside. He likes the stained-glass cockatrice weathervane, he likes the pale blue and bleached white paint, worn with age. He likes the porch that skirts the whole house, or at least what he can see of it. From the creeping vines of singing angels with their pale yellow and red petals to the partially pruned bushes of carpenter’s roses, with their gentle, persistent thorns. Katie Holt’s house looks like a  _home_ , and Keith aches, fiercely, before he banishes the feeling to where all the other feelings go.

Away.

“Matt’s at class,” she says, opening the door. The porch steps creak when he walks over them, and he absently spells his shoes to be quieter. “He got called in because his major advisor is going on a brief leave or something, they have to work out a schedule.”

Katie leads him into the house, past the well-loved living room, the kitchen smelling of lilac, past paintings of flowers and photographs of a family and the pencil marks of years tracking heights. If Keith weren’t adept at slicing his emotions down into nothing he might have boiled over, with envy, with want.

As it is, he allows an appreciation of the hardwood, of the tile, of the picture frames and the photos, but only on an aesthetic level. It feels open, flowing, and Keith wouldn't doubt that multiple members of Katie’s family are air or water bonded magicians.

She leads him to a study that's practically humming with enchantments, from protective spells to runes to charm diagrams on the walls. It's cozy, lined with full book shelves and lit by sconces in the shapes of little phoenixes, and the chairs around the low table are overstuffed and worn with well use.

There are still faint scorch marks on the ceiling, but Keith ignores them.

“Tell me,” he says once they're seated, “what your element is and what your strength is, and then we'll take a look at your wand.”

Katie folds into her chair with ease, moving to withdraw her wand the moment Keith is done speaking.

“I'm earth bonded, with an emphasis on plants, and my strongest form of casting is runes.” She recites, holding out her wand so that the wood and the minerals catch the light.

 _Steadfast but flexible,_ he thinks, taking her wand gently. It trembles in his hand and he smooths away a frown before it can manifest fully.

Katie’s wand is slim but sturdy, made from beech wood with jet lignite bands at irregular intervals. A groove separates the handle from the body of the wand, and it tapers down to a cleanly finished flat end.

“Can I see your wand?” Katie asks. It’s not an unusual question, and not a hundred years ago, had been part of the standard magician’s greeting. One could tell a lot about a person by their wands - humans predominantly wielded wood wands, many of them partnered with magical minerals, like Katie’s. Altean wands were almost constantly crystal triads, the wand core being one crystal, the body of the wand another, and an accent crystal married in at the end.

Keith hesitates, Katie’s wand balanced on his palm. It feels warm, curious, and he can feel his own wand on his arm sheath, passively cautious and waiting.

“Sure.” He says, and calls his wand into his hand before passing it and Katie’s back over.

.x.

Katie sees the hesitation on Keith’s face a moment before he draws out his own wand, and whatever she might have said about not having to be nervous vanishes when he presents it to her.

Smooth in the palm of her hand and dull in the light, Katie gazes intently at the pale wand. It’s long, as long as her forearm, and looks like it’s made of a splice of two different pale woods, almost identical in hue. It ends in a point almost sharp enough to be a weapon by itself, and it’s only once she’s spun it around to look at the handle more closely that she sees the tiny pockmarks in the material, the way it branches into two lobes.

Keith’s wand is made of  _bone_ , something Katie has never seen before.

“Which bones are these?” She asks, holding it across both her hands. Blinking rapidly, Katie drags her attention from the wand - so delicate but practically vibrating with power on her palms - to Keith’s face, where, behind his glasses, his eyes are very slightly narrowed.  _Nervous? Analyzing?_ Katie has such a hard time just  _reading_ Keith, she doesn’t know what it’ll be like learning from him. “And what’s your elemental bond?”

“Tibia and ulna,” he says, and Katie can vaguely remember something about flexibility and stubbornness, but she isn’t sure, “and I’m a fire bond.”

“So, the rumors were true!” She exclaims, and a smile flickers onto Keith’s face. “Can you really breathe fire.”

“Anyone can breathe fire with the right spells.” He replies, and she narrows her eyes at him while he looks on in a faintly smug way, aware that he’s stepped around her question as neatly as you please.

She hands his wand back with difficulty, wanting desperately to ask him all sorts of questions about it, about the splicing process, about how long it had taken to make.

The wand vanishes from Keith’s hand the moment he touches it, and it takes her a moment to realize that it’s  _willed_ magic, magic done without word or motion, magic done by thought alone, and her interest in him spikes again.

What kind of person is Keith Kogane, really?

“Alright,” Keith says, leaning forward, “what’s your schedule, and which professors do you have?” His gaze is intent and focused, different from the critical analysis of Professor Haggar’s office, and Katie feels like he’s engaging for the first time. He seems eager to get to planning out her year, even excited, and she files it away as another part of the man she’s slowly starting to see emerge from the rumors and the hearsay.

.x.

“Would you like to stay for dinner?” Katie asks, packing away the course map they’ve constructed. It’s late, almost time for Matt to call her down to eat, and she’s surprised at how quickly time has passed talking to Keith. He’s remarkably easy to talk to, she’s found. Professor Haggar was right about him making the necessary mental leaps to keep up with her ideas, but he’s just off enough, just to the right of her ideas enough, that his perspective causes her to pause, adjust, refocus and think.

_“You focus your magic -”_

_“Intuitively, but -”_

_“Your spells are a physical representation of that, lines where you have none, rules where you walk freely. You practice runes but your runes are what you_ make, _” he traces the rune for ‘fire’ in000to the air, and she can see the heatwaves rise from it, the way it glows red like an ember. A truly fire-bonded rune. She knows the paradigm - rune, lines, circles. But there’s more to it, and she can_ see  _it: the way the rune is tilted, spiky and curly, like handwriting, like_ his  _handwriting. He waves his fingers and the circle spins and the rune twirls counter to it, bands of light arcing out from it._

_“Transfiguration is hard for you because you’re the earth - a solid state. It takes another force to change you. Water -” he flexes his fingers, squinting, and steam rises from the rune, “- and you are mud. Fire and you are magma, essentially, air and you are dust, sand. You don’t like to change, sure, but you’re driven, which -”_

_“Is why my earth is stronger with plants.” Katie says, drawing her own fire rune beside his. Straighter, blockier, and her paradigm has fewer lines than his. “Sturdy but with determination. Nature follows its own lines, which is why I have trouble with_ other people’s lines. _” That made sense - transmutation had always seemed unnatural to her, counter to the nature of her magic. She knows transmutation is part of her bond - plants, sunlight, glucose, sugars, water, oxygen and carbon dioxide and a thousand other minerals. But it’s a flow to her, movement without movement, and plants can overlay themselves over unnatural lines. She’s seen the tree roots over pavement pics enough to remember that._

_“So, I have to adapt to the lines I’m given.” She says, and Keith smiles, banishing the fire rune with a wave of his hand._

Keith smiles ruefully, and Katie already knows what's happening before he even opens his mouth to say, “Unfortunately no. I have a potions assignment I have to bottle tonight, in...” he looks up, counting off on his fingers, “an hour and a half.”

Katie nods and hums, and leads Keith downs the stairs. In the kitchen Matt is humming, surprisingly on key, waving his fingers in time to music from the radio while tableware floats along to the rhythm. All of them glow pale blue as they move, settle, shift. Katie thinks about what Matt’s wand is - beech, like hers, and separated with a groove, like hers, but with two clinoclase lines running parallel to each other on either side. She thinks about his water bond, about how it affects his control over liquids, steam, and temperature.

Looking at him, watching his magic, Katie can see the way his hand affects the water bond, the way the water bond affects him. Matt’s always been good at alchemy and spell casting, two of the more fluid magical mediums. She wonders how much of that is the water, how much of it is him.

She can hear Lance and Hunk walking up the drive,  _“Professor Ikari has me by the_ balls  _man, this next advanced calc class is killing me.”_

_“Don’t worry about it, I’ll help you out. I’ve got ins with the math department TAs.”_

_“How?"_

_“They owe me.”_

_“ **What?** ”_

Katie laughs under her breath while Keith pulls on his sweater and slips into his shoes. She’s listening half to their conversation and half to Matt singing, but she misses the moment when a third voice joined the conversation outside.

What she  _does_ notice is the abrupt silence that seems to overtake the living room once the door opens.

Shiro’s standing there, one hand on the door, and Katie doesn’t even see anything out of the ordinary until she looks at Keith, and then she  _sees_.

The hand Shiro has against the door is his left, his  _human_ hand. It’s been hot out, still, so everyone’s been wearing T-shirts, and Shiro is no exception. It’s his right arm that has Keith’s full attention, his violet eyes rapt and wide. Katie doesn’t even think Keith has registered the shock of white at the front of Shiro’s hair, the Altean tan, the abnormal face stripe across his nose, the faded triangles on his cheeks.

All Keith seems to see is the dull purple arm at Shiro’s right side, the faint glow it emits, and nothing else.

.x.

It had sounded, at first, like a child’s cry in Keith’s mind. He thought he was hearing things, or that someone was passing by in a car - grief, trauma, it called to him.

But it’d gotten louder as Keith had listened to Katie’s brother sing and he’d pulled on his shoes, and louder still as the two voices Katie seemed to recognize neared the house.

And then the tall Altean guy pushes open Katie’s door, and Keith’s mind sings so sharply and then falls into silence so abruptly that he’s almost rocked back on his heels, everything else falling away.

He wants to reach out, to touch the arm, so vivid and real and  _more_. Keith has read innumerable fantasy books, and all he can think of is  _an arm more real than real_. Reality seems to pale around the arm, a three-dimensional vision in a two-dimensional world.

Keith doesn’t even realize that no one is talking until Katie touches his arm and he looks down at her. She’s frowning, mouth pursed and drawn, and it all hits him, all at once - the screaming emotion from the Altean’s arm, or the memory of it; Katie, radiating confusion, loyalty, a fierce devotion to protect, even if she didn’t know what Keith was thinking. Beyond her in one direction, Matt whistles obliviously. Outside, Katie’s friends peer around the - well muscled, broad - shoulder of the Altean, curious as to why they can’t get inside.

It’s harder than he anticipated, packing it all away, slicing his emotions down to ribbons and then bundling them up into boxes in his mind, but he does it. He smiles down at Katie, adjusts his sweater, says, “I’ll see you Tuesday, Katie,” turns to the Altean and Katie’s two human friends, says, “Gentlemen,” like he’s greeting her parents, awkward and not meeting anyone’s eyes. He eases past the Altean, down the charming creaky stairs and down the street.

He makes it home on autopilot, barely noticing the bus ride. He unlocks his door, kicks off his shoes, walks to his room all without seeing any of it, mind whirling with the implications of what he’s seen, what he knows, what the lines being drawn mean, the picture they make.

When he finally comes back into himself he’s curled up on the bed, staring at his ceiling. The light catches on the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling, their scattered clusters drawing his eyes along unconsciously, out of habit.

 _What had that Altean been_ thinking _?_ Is his first thought, rubbing roughly at his face. Keith couldn’t be sure what spell the Altean had done to gain that arm, but he could feel the trauma of it, the fear, the cycle that fed it, that kept it living and anchored to the scarred stump of his shoulder.

 _Those scars were a paradigm._ He realizes, running over the image of the stump in his mind. What kind of paradigm though? Summoning? Transmutation? It had felt so… Keith didn’t have words for it. Not the right words.

Deep, natural, steady, jagged, rooted, strong. The arm was old magic, and old wound, and if he’d had it for as long as Keith  _thought_ he’d had it, then…

Then what?

Keith scrubbed his hands over his face again, pulling at his magic.

_I’ll be seeing a lot more of him, being at the Holt’s._

He pushes the heels of his hands into his eyes, groaning. Spots dance across his vision, but they do nothing to blur the memory of the Altean. Tall, broad shouldered. Black and white hair, the trauma bleaching the color out of it and the cheek dags typical of Alteans – maybe. Maybe. The nose scar was… an addition, a mutation perhaps, too soft edged to be a scar.  _He had soft eyes_ , Keith thinks. Grey, shocked at first at seeing a stranger in the Holt house, no doubt, but then resigned.

And Keith hadn’t even apologized.

_Fuck._

.x.

“That was  _Keith Kogane!_ ” Lance practically shrieks once Keith has booked it, leaving a bewildered Katie and a confused trio at the door. At least Lance collects himself quickly, Katie thinks, grabbing her plate and moving to the living room. It’s movie night, despite Keith’s little disturbance, and Matt’s already queueing up a DVD.

“He’s my transfiguration tutor.” She says, sorting the brussel sprouts out of her vegetables. Hunk plucks them up as she does so, trading them for mushrooms.

The silence that follows lasts until she realizes she probably has to look at Lance so he can engage Full Dramatic Effect. She humors him, looking up to see the mix of shock and awe that has him mouth dropped comically open.

“I hate that guy!” He exclaims. At her side, Hunk muffles a snort in his glass. “He thinks he’s  _so cool_ , even in a trash class like  _Spell Theory_.”

“I have a class with him too.” Shiro says, leaning against an arm of the couch. “Advanced Battle Spells.” He snaps his fingers. “History of the Three Races with Professor Link, too.”

Katie hmms, eating, and the more they talk the more they realize that Keith Kogane is a lot more present than they initially thought. He leads a study group for Hunk’s upper division Alchemy course, has Spell Theory with Lance, is in two classes with Shiro, assists with Katie’s Transfiguration class, _and_ does tech work for Matt’s Magic and Machinery class.

But they don’t know anything about him, not really.

 _Well_ , Katie thinks as she cuts into her chicken,  _I know he has a bone wand, and a fire bond._

She pauses. A bone wand and a fire bond.

And her mind starts whirring.

.x.

There’s a lot of crap on the internet about wands and the magic that goes into them. Magicians make their own wands during an enchanted fugue state under the supervision of a more advanced magician, choosing materials on intuition and magical pull. Katie remembers her own wand making as a moment of perfect clarity, like the realest memory she has.

It’s not the same for everyone though, and the more she searches for information on bone wands the more crap she finds about  _emotional influence on magic_ and the stability of a wand wielder who tries to make their wands out materials favored by two different races. That’s something for later, she decides.

It takes a trip to the school’s History Library to actually find anything useful, and then it’s only after spending four and a half hours digging through the stacks that she finds something _related_ to what she thinks she knows. The thing she finds is more historical tomb than library book, and the pages are done up in the style of ‘progressive inks’, so the first dozen or so chapters are illuminated with gorgeous marginalia and beautiful headers.

She doesn’t bother checking it out, although the likelihood of being allowed to is infinitely smaller than she’d like to calculate, so she settles at a reading nook on the fourth floor and digs through years and years of carefully constructed research.

People filter in and out of the library as the hours pass, but Katie remains, learning.

.x.

_Although not all cultures use wands - magical schools and more standardized magical practice curricula have lead to the propagation of wand and wand-like objects as foci of magical powers - the three dominant magical races have a propensity for specific wand types._

_Human wands, those used predominantly across the American continents and Western Europe, and in select regions of Africa and Asia, are crafted from the wood of trees and, in some cases, particular bushes. Magical families tend to use wands crafted from plants native to the region of their bloodlines. Those families that have traveled for any reason often take the wood type of their homeland with them (see chapter 12 - The Nature of Non-Native Magic: The Travel of Magical Practices), and their descendants in their new place of residence are often proof products of these magical transitions, bearing wands crafted of marriages between their familial native wood and a wood from their relocated region. Depending on the magician, a wand may be made of a single wood, a combination of woods, a wood and a stone, or a combination of woods and stones. (For wood and mineral combinations see Appendix 4, Human Wand Materials.)_

_Altean wands, a race who draws magic from the power wells of places like Cueva de los Cristales and Skaftafell, have wands made of crystal triads. The construction of these wands is completed in three stages - the initial formation of the Line, or the wand core. The next two stages are completed almost simultaneously: the body of the wand is formed around the core, and the bands fill in the gaps in the body. This triad of crystal symbolizes the individual, the location, and the family of the Altean in question. Altean crystal wands are some of the strongest wands, and their wand makers are some of the most renowned among the magical communities. Altean wand makers can work with the wand materials of all three of the primary magical races, although human and Galran wands made by Altean wand makers are best suited for half-Altean magicians, as Altean-made wands tend to be “placid”, “finicky” or “difficult” depending on the wielder (Askilla,_ The Effect of Wand Makers on Wands,  _and_ Wielding a Wand: Wands Influenced by the Innate Magic of their Craftsmen _)._

 _Galran wands are those wands made from neither minerals nor woods. Regarded as the most volatile and unanchored of the three primary races, Galran magicians are those magicians that require wands crafted from the bones of magical animals or, in exceptionally rare cases, magical individuals. Typically, these bones are the primary bones of the body, the largest, the most ‘important’. Although wands formed of tarsals, metatarsals, etc., have been made, they are not common, and most Galran wands are crafted from ribs, the radii, ulnae, femurs, tibias, and fibulas of magical beings. On some occasions skulls, scapulae, and spinal vertebrae have been used, but these instances are rare, as cylindrical bones are more receptive to wand making. For the Galra, each bone has a meaning and a significance (see Appendix 6, Galran Wand Material Meanings). Galran wands, like human and Altean wands, are crafted from multiple materials - however, Galran wands are the only wands made almost exclusively from one primary material. On some rare occasions, Galran wands are accented by thin veins of precious metals or liquidized precious stones. If Galran wands have ever contained the symmetrical lines and semi-consistent patterns found in Altean and human wands they have been kept from the shared histories of the three races (see_ Shared Histories of the Magical Races; Galra Wands: A Collective History;  _and_ Wand Making, Intricacies and Histories of the World Volume IV _)._

_No two wands are alike, even those wands owned by identical twins of any of the three magical races._

.x.

Once Katie starts looking, two things become apparent to her.

The first: Keith Kogane is  _everywhere_.

It’s not just the classes he has with everyone she knows, it’s that no matter where Katie turns  _there he is_.

She deduces that his favorite color must be red, because since the red turtleneck she has seen him wear: a red jacket, a red scarf, a red beanie, a red vest, red gloves, red  _pants_ (like this is high school and he still wants people to  _know_ he shops at Hot Topic). She’s also pretty sure he has red shoes, but she honestly hasn’t been looking at his feet.

He’s in front of her in the lunch line, or an isle away at the library. He seems to be tutoring not one but  _three_ of her fellow classmates, or he’s involved in clubs that are helping out with her classes, or he’s standing with the petitioner students brandishing a clipboard for the student union.

The second thing she notices: bone wands aren’t  _uncommon_.

It’s not like she suddenly starts noticing them left right and center or anything, but… they’re there. Mark Graves and Helen Chen in trig have bone wands. Anita Wasswa in her row in transfiguration. Rumi Boshiviski in magical mechanics. The more Katie really looks the more she sees them, the bone wand wielding students. They don’t act any differently than anyone else, as far as she can see. Rumi has always been quiet, Helen has always been best at practical application, and Anita and Mark are history buffs, even if they don’t know each other.

The dichotomy, Katie realizes after the second week of stealthily cataloging bone wands, is that no one who has a bone wand  _looks_ Galran. Helen Chen is five five, nowhere near the Galran standard six foot. No one looks like a finely furred purple cat bi-ped, and the only person Katie’s ever seen with yellow eyes is Professor Haggar, and most people think she’s got some sort of foresight enchantment on her eyes, since she always catches cheaters.

 _Haggar’s got white sclera, though_. Katie thinks, looking across her coffee table at Keith while he draws out step by step instructions on how to adapt Katie’s understanding of runes to their most recent transfiguration homework. Professor Haggar has upped the complexity of her transmutation paradigms, and the layered circles and lines make Katie’s head spin.

The reason she hasn’t just outright  _asked_ if Keith is Galran is because… they’re temperamental. Their magic is taboo, strange,  _dark_. Katie can remember the pamphlets on Galra warfare, on Galra magic being corruptive, taboo. She could vaguely remember the news reporting violence against Galra businesses, Galran men and women being targeted in the streets and on subways and buses. There had been a girl in one of her classes, a Galran girl with violet fur, and then one day she’d been gone, but Katie couldn’t remember to where.

She doesn’t know how to ask Keith if he’s Galran, though. There’d been an exodus of Galra emigration following Zarkon’s failed coup, back across the mountains to the north, to Galra and Azephus. They’d closed their borders for years – at least that’s what Katie remembered. No one had really been to Galra since, and she couldn’t remember anyone saying that they’d seen any Galra traveling.

It was like they’d just up and _vanished_ one day, and no one had talked about the gaps they’d left behind.

Looking at Keith, who’s seated at his own small desk facing Professor Haggar’s transfiguration class, Katie can see the ways in which his carefully cultivated apathy and his quiet have started to slip. Maybe it’s just around her, just in her house, but Katie’s seen him laugh, seen him snark, seen him come alive when working through spell theory and rune mapping; she’s seen him fight with transfiguration paradigms and fuck up some basic spell casting that they’d been attempting to tweak. Keith is more than _hypothetically_ Galra, and Katie… this isn’t something that can be worked out with math, or hit with enough force that it’ll work right.

She doesn’t know what to do, and it’s scary and nerve wracking and…

She leaves it.

.x.

Tutoring Katie falls easily into his routine, just like the other teaching sessions he hosts or assists with. Being able to teleport across campus allows for a more condensed schedule, and Katie is easy to find once he can sort out her magical signature from the mire of students.

The problem, really, isn’t how hard it is to help Katie - it’s how hard Keith has to refrain from  _not_ helping Shiro.

Takashi Shirogane.

The first few times Keith comes around to help Katie with the groundworks of how she’s going to be manipulating transmutation to fit her magic, rather than her magic to fit transmutation, they work in Katie’s basement lab. Sometimes her partners in crime come down to learn too, but neither of them have strong earth bonds with plants.

“Could this work for me?” Hunk asks during one of their sessions, indicating a floating paradigm that helps Katie’s magic better adapt to the strict rules of transmutation. Hunk’s earth bond has reacted well with several of the paradigms he’s used to teach Katie, but it’s hit and miss – even though they’re both earth-bonds, their specialties are sometimes at odds.

Keith frowns, draws the paradigm with his wand in front of Hunk, cueing it into his magic with a flick. It flutters, hovering briefly, and looks like it will burn out right before Keith twists one of the rune lines into a different shape. The color coalesces into a strong, deep green edged with a hard shine, indicative of Hunks earth-metal bond.

“This one should, although you’d probably only need it for spell casting.”

“What about me?” Lance asks, that competitive edge to his voice that lets Keith know he’s ready to duel. Lance seems to basically always want to practice attack spells with Keith, which Keith doesn’t  _mind_ , but he’s almost ridiculously adverse to Keith showing him new ones in a way that indicates _teaching._

Which normally means Keith has to send Lance flying on his ass to get him to ask how something is done. He’s really hoping that that’ll change, since both Hunk and Katie aren’t as aggressive and Katie’s basement is made mostly for containment, not absorption and redirection like and actual dueling hall.

He starts to draw the paradigm, thinking about Lance and Lance’s water bond, how he’s best at altered water, like ice and frost. It takes some doing to keep his own magic from influencing the paradigm, what with Lance’s deep connection being hoarfrost. Keith’s lucky that the magical schools weren’t often in the habit of drafting their soldiers, and that if they  _did_ end up in such a situation Lance would probably be on his side. When he finally got around to controlling his magic enough to use the water attack spells that required finesse, his power would make him one of the people Keith wouldn’t want to meet on the battlefield.

“This one,” Keith says, and flips his wand to point with the broad end at the rune lines that are different between Katie’s, Hunks, and his. “When you make it yourself you’ll want to think more flow, Mobius almost, rather than the branch system Katie has, or Hunk’s veining.”

Lance looks pacified, focusing on his own floating paradigm, and leaves Keith to tutoring Katie while he and Hunk bounce spell ideas off each other using Keith’s stepping stones.

That’s how it normally goes when Katie has her friends over: Keith helps Katie move through some transmutation sequence that has her stumped, which has become fewer and farther between as the weeks have progressed into months, and her friends use what he’s teaching her to augment their own worst subjects. It works, sometimes pretty impressively.

And then it turns the basement into a lake for several days, which drives Keith and Katie upstairs.

That’s where Keith gets his first real, prolonged look, at Shiro’s arm.

Keith is listening to something low lyricless, serving mostly as white-noise while he looks over Katie’s homework and the lesson plans they’ve been drafting for the past month and a half. He tries to keep Katie in line with Professor Haggar’s lectures and labs while still supplementing things where he can. Katie’s unique situation and power reserves mean that some of the pillars of stability used in transmutation by other people aren’t as reliable when she attempts the same things, and Keith has to find ways to work around the crush of her power so that she doesn’t always end up exploding her projects. 

He’s looking down at something about paradigm shifts mid-transmutation when the door swings open, and because he’s not paying close enough attention to his surroundings -  _getting soft_ a part of him whispers - he thinks it’s Matt, home from class and ready to take up residence in his office, where he’s been the past few days since his major advisor changed his schedule.

Instead, an unfamiliar weight settles at the opposite end of the couch, a faint electrical buzz dancing across Keith’s awareness, and his eyes jerk up without his consent.

Takashi Shirogane is there, peering curiously at Keith’s color-coded notes and diagrams, and Keith is struck again by the full image of the Altean.

Shiro might be a distant relation to royalty, or mixed, because the only part of his hair that’s white is the patch at the front, the rest of it being a deep, coal black. The dags beneath his eyes are pale grey, faded against the tan of his skin, and Keith wonders if that’s part of the trauma. He doesn’t know enough about Altean physiology to guess as to whether or not the color can be affected like human hair can. Does he dye it? He shakes the thought away, putting it in a stack of questions for another time.

 _He has kind eyes_ , Keith thinks, watching the other man read his notes. He has kind eyes and a ready smile, present even as he seems to get more and more lost the longer he reads.

“Good afternoon,” Keith says, and is surprised to find an edge of warmth in his voice. “Finding my notes interesting?”

Shirogane looks startled a moment, and his eyes swing back up to Keith as he turns and  _oh_ , Keith thinks,  _that might have been a mistake_. The full weight of Shirogane’s attention is something he didn’t know he had to  _prepare_ himself for, but clearly it is, because he feels it like a weight, like those same soft eyes are pulling his layers apart, bit by bit, and he’s only been facing the other man for a handful of seconds.

“I didn’t realize so much went into transfigurative conversion.” Shirogane says, holding out a hand. “I’m Takashi Shirogane, but you can call me Shiro, everyone else does.” The smile that quirks his mouth sends Keith’s heart into short, arrhythmic spasms, and he barely registers taking Shiroga - Shiro’s hand.

“Keith Kogane, Katie’s tutor.” He replies, and Shiro’s smile goes sweet and wide at the mention of the Holt genius.

“She’s had a lot to say about you.” Shiro says, and there’s an edge of playfulness to his voice that probably means Katie’s had some not-so-nice things about his tutoring methods.

Keith keeps a snort to himself.  _That’s fine_ , he decides,  _it’s not like I’d change anything if she’d complained to me directly. Talking smack about my process behind my back won’t make any impact either._

Shiro goes back to looking over Keith’s notes, eyes focused and curious, and Keith goes back to looking over the material Professor Haggar handed out in class that day, highlighting sections he’d have to put through a ‘translator’ to make them easier for Katie.

“What does this mean?” Shiro asks, pointing at one of the runes that defines a transition matrix.

“It filters Katie’s earth-bond. It’s a conversion rune that loops Katie’s magic through a filter, peeling away part of her earth-bond so that the more neutral magic can adapt to her transmutations…” He explains, drawing it with his wand. It's pale, ghost-white lines hover between them, and Shiro watches it with rapt attention. “Her earth-bond is very strong, and it fights the transmutation castings. Until she's better at refining her magic it'll help her get used to the focusing she has to do.”

Shiro looks rapt, leaning back and forward to get a view of it at different angles.

“Can you teach me these?” he asks, pointing at to the drawings Keith’s done for Katie.

It… might not be a good idea, he thinks, being that close to Shiro’s strange, tantalizing arm. It's a low, sighing hum of magic against his skin now, relaxed and dull at Shiro’s side.

But what about when he uses magic? How does it affect his elemental bond? His neutral magic? Does he even  _have_  neutral magic, or is it always tainted by the purple sadness of the trauma?

Even locked up in the steel trap of his control, the curiosity overrides the tickle of anxiety and apprehension that swirls through him. There are so few  _living_  examples of this magic, and it calls to him even as he's repulsed by it. The trauma stings him, but the magic whispers across his own.

It's strange, because it's pure magic, but it's  _all_  trauma. Pure trauma, even old.

“Sure,” He says, and he can feel part of himself fighting it even as he does so. “We have class together, I’m pretty sure. We can meet up after, if you’re not busy?”

It takes everything in him not to overanalyze the minute movements of Shiro’s face, the up-tick of his eyebrows, the surprise that tilts his mouth. He wonders, not for the first time, what rumors about him Shiro has heard that he should make that kind of face at Keith’s willingness to instruct. Katie, for all her blunt aptitude and snappy temper, doesn’t actually say anything behind Keith’s back that she _hasn’t_ said to his face, and most of it is playful jabs (the rest is expletives, because for all her affinity with plants she still manages to blow things up more often than the average student).

Or, it could be that Shiro’s just surprised Keith remembers they have a class together, and – well, Keith isn’t sure if Shiro realizes, but he’s a rather hard person to ignore, all things considered.

They spend an hour or so on the couch, mostly with Shiro asking questions and Keith answering. It’s different demonstrating things with Shiro, who has better than average magical refinement for someone of twenty-three, but Keith can’t exactly claim to be a statistical norm either.

That night, laying on top of his covers, Keith wonders if it’s a product of his arm, that precision. He wonders how little or how much Shiro depends on it, on the magic in it. He wonders about the affect it has on his spells, and how Shiro has learned to compensate for it, if it exists; if it doesn’t, then why? Did Shiro have to do anything himself? Was it something that happened gradually, or was it always like that?

There are too many variables wrapped up in the mystery of Shiro’s arm, and Keith, never one to like anything that wasn’t straight-forward, decides he’s going to find out as much as he can without being a colossal asshole about it.

Because he has tact, sometimes.

Despite what Haggar says.

.x.

“You seem pleased.” Shiro’s counselor observes, taking notes on their legal pad. “Good news?”

He hums, nodding a little. “My friend Matt, his sister has a tutor, and he’s amazing.” Just saying it brings forward memories of Keith, eyes bright as he instructed Shiro on how to draw up two- and three-dimensional paradigms, the lines and circles becoming complex, interlocking knots of red and blue, Shiro’s wand tracing along in mirror of his own. “He’s agreed to teach me advanced transmutation paradigms when Katie isn’t with him.”

“Good, that’s good. You haven’t made a new friend in a long time, I’m happy for you. It’s important to create these bonds, but it can be tough, putting yourself out there.”

Shiro nods, looking to side. He doesn’t feel particularly brave, or like it’s a big deal. He doesn’t _need_ to be brave for Keith, who’s easy to talk to and to laugh with. He’s studious and kind, and always ready with some sort of information about something, like he’s got a rolodex of facts in his head just waiting to be used.

“Now, how do you feel about these transmutation paradigms? Does any part of the situation make you uncomfortable?”

And Shiro knows they have to ask, knows that that’s the next logical step in finding out about Shiro’s newest acquaintance – how do you feel about the things they do, Shiro?

It’s something he’s been mulling over too, ever since the moment he decided he wanted to spend time with Keith, right there on the couch when Katie and Matt were still waiting for their basement to drain. He’d looked at Keith’s notes – not exactly meticulous, or well organized, but not exceedingly messy, either – and it was endearing and intriguing. Rambling, with notes in the margins, but he’d seen that Keith had rewritten them for Katie, and those notes were better organized, less rambling theoreticals in cramped script in the corners, fewer scratched out circles and hypothetical paradigms.

Keith’s notes revealed a sliver of a mind constantly moving, shifting, analyzing and creating.

And Shiro wanted to know that mind. He wants to know Keith.

“No.” He says, and the confidence in his voice is almost convincing. “No, I’m looking forward to learning about them.”

That part, the interest? That’s real.

.x.

Keith doesn’t really _tutor_ Shiro in the same way he tutors Katie. Shiro already knows where he’ll be going after Arus – Battle Magic Command School – already has impeccable magical finesse and a strong understanding of his bond – water, specializing in dual spellcasting and runes, much to Keith’s intrigue – and knows the majority of what Keith is ‘translating’ for Katie in transmutation.

It’s the new things, the things Keith’s been coming up with _himself_ , that Shiro wants to know about.

Keith has always been fascinated with the boundaries of magic, the pseudo Venn Diagrams where one style of magic overlays just a little with another. These grey areas are where magical breakthroughs are made, like multi-layer paradigms and spell nets with concrete shapes.

He wants to dig into the roots of magic and pull until he knows everything he can, _understands_ everything he can, about how magic impacts a person, about how people impact magic, about how magic affects a life, a family, a race –

His second hobby is genetic magic, not only how magic affects blood and how blood magic works, but how magical propensity is passed, how elemental bonds are created in a family. There’s so much to _know_ about magic and its interactions with people, and it’s those things that he scribbles in the margins of his notes for class, for Katie, and it’s those notes that Shiro latches on to.

_“What does this mean - ?”_

_“But if you put this here does it - ?”_

_“How about you change this, then the flow will be smoother, right?”_

_“I know you like circles, Keith, but you’re going to short out the power coil here, see?”_

Shiro is fascinated by what he doesn’t know, eager to learn and discover and create, even though he doesn’t have much of a mind for organic production alone. His insights are good, sound, theory backed with practice and sometimes even stories, little things that Keith hordes close and protects fiercely in his mind.

_“This one time, Matt and I blew up the front yard – I’m not kidding!”_

_“Oh, I know how to do this – Matt almost lost an ear once, I had to put it back on before Mrs. Holt came home… What?”_

_“I enchanted a broom to fly once – like in those books? It sort of… broke a lot of windows. But! Now I know how to negate **this** , so.”_

Every little insight builds Shiro in Keith’s mind. He’s easy to talk to, even if Keith often ends up on tangents about minutia that he finds absolutely _riveting_ , Shiro just smiling on in curiosity and bemusement, his face so soft and open that Keith is, he wants to –

He shakes himself, focusing. _I desperately want to get at that arm_. He tells himself, over and over again. _I want to know what happened to Shiro’s arm, that’s all_.

Keith sighs, flopping back on his bed. Above him, winding around the star clusters on his ceiling, a series of paradigms and string-spells have been painted on the ceiling.

This is the first night of Keith’s big experiment, and he’s _afraid_.

His uncle isn’t home, off working on some diplomatic relations venue, and Keith is alone in the house. He could call Haggar, if he wanted – she would be the second person on his emergency contacts list. Or… no, some people are best left on the _opposite_ side of the mountains. Despite Keith’s adoration for his half-brother, there are somethings one doesn’t want siblings meddling in.

Projecting one’s self through the spirit-plane to try and fix the trauma done to the magical arm of a guy who doesn’t know it’s happening is definitely one of those things.

Centering himself, Keith thinks about all the research he’s done, the things he’s practiced, if only briefly. He knows the tethering incantation by heart, could probably find his own body even at school, and he knows how it _should_ look when he moves beyond himself.

He breathes, once, twice, as deeply as he can, filling his lungs. He thinks, _to seek, to find, to hold, to observe,_ and then, in a language he rarely gets to hear, _su anel, su anii, su chetti, su tekt._ The words burn through him, lighting him up, and he downs his sleeping drought while the magic of it sings in his veins.

He falls into sleep as his mind flies up into the waiting magic above him, taking him beyond the restraints of his body.

.x.

_It’s like opening his eyes for the first time._

_There are no boundaries, no limits. He can feel his magic around him, through him, more present than ever before. He can almost feel the well of himself, the way his magic sinks back into something bigger than himself. A tether to the world, to the network of the universe almost._

**_Focus, focus_ ** **.** _He tells himself, reaching for his purpose. It would be easy to get lost here, he thinks, easy to just stay in this neutral place where the entire world feels open to him._

_He looks around, searching for landmarks. The world is strangely two dimensional in this place, like there’s no difference between what’s close and what’s far away. There are constellations of color, like the stars on his ceiling, in varying shades of blue, green, silver and yellow, and it clicks after a moment, **element bonds**. _

_The lights are people._

**_But which is the one I want?_ **

_Shiro is a water bond, and as he thinks it the other lights dim, the blues popping out against the darkness. There are still so many of them so he concentrates, thinking of Shiro’s magic, his smile, the warmth of his laughter at his stories about Matt and their childhood adventures._

_He’s moving – or the light is moving toward him – before he’s done thinking of the sparks Shiro’s laugh puts in his stomach._

_There’s no_ feeling _of movement, only the abrupt closeness of an indigo light that’s the same shape as Shiro. The trauma magic stands out as a slash of violet on his right, the edges crackling with yellow and red – **fear and anger, or fear and pain?** , Keith wonders. It’s definitely from the trauma incident and then the repeated used of the arm itself, possibly even from the arm’s constant state of summoning. The arm was a trauma construct, something summoned on accident and then fed on the relived trauma in the memories it pulled up with it every time Shiro had to use it. _

_Keith can see the lances of lightning shooting through the purple, almost like nerves, the red a malignant stain toward the top, where the magic met the body. The paradigm on the end of Shiro’s_ real _arm was the same intense gold, and Keith reached for it pulling it into view._

 **_Tatek ammu te’shivi alh._ ** _He reads, and it boils in him at the same time the arm responds, its wailing cries almost harmonizing instead of fighting each other. **Olte’ib banne cho kehle.**_

**_Voices of the past of me, speak. Bring only truth with your words._ **

_It’s not a summoning Keith recognizes, and it doesn’t read_ right _to be just a summoning. He pulls at it, trying to see more, but it hisses at him like a living thing._

 **_Enough of you_ ** _. He chides, and imagines the red stain as an ember in his hands. It spits, angry and old and almost tired of clinging to Shiro’s grief, but not enough to let go alone. He pierces the heart of it with his own fire, clean and unfettered by emotion, and in the mind scape the cloud deflates until only wisps of it cling to Shiro’s arm._

 ** _Fire is my right._** _He tells it, and smothers the last of it with the pressure of his own. It gasps, fleeting and quiet in the void, and Keith falls back, suddenly_ tired, the physical presence of his bed beneath him a comfort after the strange, surreal weightlessness of the magical plane.

He doesn’t bother to look at the clock or change or get anything ready for the next day, he just rolls onto his side (unknowingly in the direction of Shiro’s apartment), and falls into exhaustion.

.x.

Across town, wrapped in his own sheets, Shiro lets out a strangled gasp – one of mingled relief, surprise, and desperation, and his nightmares ease, just a little.

.x.

“Have Shiro and Keith been spending a lot of time together?” Katie asks, stewing over her homework. Keith’s annotations pepper it with blue pen, but it doesn’t make any of it any easier to _do_ , just slightly easier to understand.

To her left Lance and Hunk are hunched over Lance’s calc homework, very unsubtly playing footsie where they think Katie can’t see (or hear – sometimes Lance kicks the table on accident).

They look up from one of Lance’s problems to glance at Shiro and Keith, sitting together at the end of the kitchen table that can just barely be seen from the living room.

Keith is TA impeccable, bundled against the recent drop in temperature in a maroon sweater and fingerless gloves. His hair is back in its tiny tale, as ever, and his glasses have slipped down his nose as he looks over Shiro’s work. He’s speaking, saying something Katie can just barely hear. At his side Shiro leans in, listening intently. It’s easy to watch his eyes move from Keith’s eyes to his mouth, attention rarely on the paper.

Keith, as he is with anything not Magic Related or Blatantly Obvious, as Katie has learned, is completely oblivious.

.x.

Winter moves in with a two-week long rainstorm at the beginning of the second quarter that turns the unpaved parts of the campus into a swamp. The mass teleportation stations get so overstressed they break halfway through, forcing a large chunk of the commuting students to attempt teleporting into the area blind, aiming for dry land but, more often than not, coming out of the experience with water up to their ankles.

It’s two days into the fiasco when Keith offers Shiro a ride home after their history class, unwilling to brave the huddled crowds at the stations, a mass Keith doesn’t understand when the rain has petered out to a bare mist for the first time in days.

“Are you sure?” Shiro asks, shifting his backpack against his shoulder. He uses his magic arm, and Keith wants desperately to reach out and take his hand. It must feel amazing, and even though he’s still attuned to the quiet crying that seems to accompany it, he wants to hold it.

“Positive.” He says, jerking a thumb at the platforms. They’re only slightly raised above the surrounding quad, and the crowd that’s jostling on it is practically spilling off. Keith looks at them for a long moment before he turns his attention back to Shiro, who’s biting his lip in an obvious bid to hold in laughter.

Keith doesn’t know when it happened, but he’s gotten _emotive_ around Katie Holt and her friends, and, most embarrassingly, Shiro. It’s been a long time since he’s had anyone _laugh_ at him in a way that wasn’t demeaning somehow. His uncle is a pinnacle of emotional control, and Keith isn’t exactly in his company enough to really see if he can get the man going.

“This way.” He says with an exasperated eyeroll, and he turns away before he allows himself to smile. He can’t let Shiro _see_ how much his amusement brightens Keith, even though he’s pretty sure that Shiro knows he’s laughing at the older man too.

.x.

Keith’s ride is a motorcycle. And not just _any_ motorcycle, like those nice ones Shiro’s seen in movies, the ones greasers ride that look cute almost. Keith’s is a monster, all sleek red and black paint and aggressive lines. He can barely see the red of a glowing paradigm system woven against it, and he can read the lines _strength, flexibility, durability, water resistant, temperature, control_.

“What do you see?” Keith asks, and it’s his ‘teacher voice’, the one Shiro has come to associate with something Keith thinks he can understand but that Keith won’t outright tell him, expecting Shiro to find the answer.

He crouches close, and, now that he’s paying attention, he can almost feel the purr of it against his skin, the strength of the magic as it loops back on itself, again and again, doubling and quadrupling in power. Keith isn’t a weak magician by any means, but the magic laced through the motorcycle is something completely new, entirely different from the things he’s been teaching Katie, or even Shiro, who has better finesse.

“This is why you were working on three-dimensional paradigms, isn’t it?” Shiro asks, wanting to reach out but refraining. The bike almost seems alive with the magic coursing through it, and Shiro wouldn’t doubt that there’s a rune and a paradigm on every single piece of it, from the gas tank to the taillights.

Keith beams at him – or, Keith’s version of beaming, which is all faintly curved lips and a slight crinkling of his eyes. He’s leaps and bounds from the shocked man that had stared in a strange combination of fascination, desperation, and sadness at Shiro’s arm that first day at the Holt house. He’s not even the heavily guarded tutor that Shiro had stumbled across three weeks ago in the living room, carefully refining his notes into something close to perfection. He’s not as expressive as Lance or Katie, to be sure, but he’s warmer, now; not soft, because there’s always an edge to Keith, a distance Shiro doesn’t entirely understand in the way he keeps his hands and his eyes to himself, tracking things over Shiro’s shoulders or off to the side.

Shiro can see it in him even then, a strain to retain space between them, writ large in the way he leans forward toward Shiro and the bike – and yeah, he could be leaning closer to his motorcycle, but it’s obvious he isn’t, and if _Shiro_ can see it –

Well.

“It’s beautiful.” He says, and Keith works his jaw in the way he does when he’s fighting off a larger smile. He looks away, scuffing his red shoes on the damp asphalt.

“Built it in the summer.” He says, and Shiro watches the red rise in his cheeks. “Didn’t have any classes.”

Shiro hmms, deciding to reign himself in a little more, and stands back up. “Ready?” He asks instead, and Keith’s eyes slide to him before he turns, brilliantly purple eyes analyzing.

He remembers what Katie had said once over dinner, after one particularly rigorous spell session that had had Keith going Full Teacher on her, _he has eyes like he’s looking through me_ \- and it feels the same, like Keith can parse through all of his layers to the root of him with just a look.

Shiro swallows and looks away.

“Yeah.” Keith says, and goes about unstrapping the two helmets he has on the saddlebags of the bike.

“Were you anticipating this?” Shiro asks, gesturing between himself and the bike. Keith grunts as he tugs his helmet on, effectively hiding his face. He flips the visor up so that Shiro can see his eyes, but they’re carefully guarded and he can’t get anything from them.

“I thought it’d be faster. Plus I have to drop by my place before I go to the Holt’s. I didn’t see why we’d have to make multiple trips.”

Something warm twists in Shiro’s chest, and he can’t formulate a response that doesn’t focus on Keith’s willingness to take him to his home, on Keith thinking of Shiro, caught in the rain or on the tele-pads, and deciding that he’d rather _take him to his house_ than have him trek to Matt’s place in soggy shoes.

“Get on.” Keith says, slinging a leg over the bike. There’s a buzzing in Shiro’s helmet and then Keith’s voice is right by his ear, making him shiver. “Hold on tight, and when we take corners lean with me, okay?”

“Okay.” Shiro says, a little breathless, but Keith doesn’t say anything, just settles his hands on the grips while Shiro slides in behind him, arms wrapping around his waist. Keith adjusts them almost absently, making Shiro’s hold tighter, and then he’s revving the bike into life and carefully pushing off from the curb.

The first few minutes are fine. They don’t go very fast around the school traffic, Keith choosing instead to lane-split and coast by until they make it to the main thoroughfares. Shiro allows himself to think, briefly, that it’s not so bad, riding on a vehicle with no protection except his clothes while everyone else wields _two ton weapons_ on the slick streets.

Then, at the last stoplight for at least ten minutes, and at the opposite end of the city from Katie’s house, Keith’s voice ghosts back into his helmet, sounding faintly excited.

“Hold on.” He repeats, and Shiro can’t get out more than a confused noise before Keith is revving again, this time with _intent_ , and then they’re off, speeding down the road around cars faster than Shiro’s ever been before.

It’s terrifying. It’s exhilarating. There has never been so much adrenaline in Shiro’s system, ~~not even~~ ( _don’t think about it_ ) – never.

Keith handles the bike deftly, sliding around cars and taking curves so gently that Shiro barely notices that they’re turning corners at all until he happens to glance to one side and see the ground a _lot_ closer than it should be.

“ _Jesus shit._ ” He gasps, and Keith’s laugh between their helmets is delighted and bright.

It takes maybe ten minutes to go from the campus to Keith’s place, which is a tall, thin three story butted up against other student housing. It’s almost at the border where the city becomes the suburbs, and Shiro knows that twenty minutes more and they’ll be at Katie’s house, the family housing of the city vastly different than the college clusters.

Keith pulls into the short driveway slowly, the division between his house and the next marked by a thin strip of vivid grass. He has a front yard, in a manner of speaking, and it lies parallel to the grass strip, parallel to stairs that lead up to the first floor. Keith leads him up the stairs, across the small porch and the faux-bay windows, and into the house.

“Kitchen’s there,” he says, pointing to the right. The first floor is divided, stairs against the far wall, with the living room to the left and the kitchen to the right, everything open, everything painted in light yellows and pale greens, threaded through with golds, and reds, accented by light browns. It’s a meld of colors Shiro wasn’t entirely expecting to see, but it doesn’t seem _wrong_ , either, Keith living in in this environment full of restrained color.

“There’s a bathroom beneath the stairs, too.” He says as they remove their shoes, socks shuffling across the wood floor. He leads Shiro passed a black sectional and it’s mismatched grey ottoman, the rug beneath it a swirl of grey and cream and light blue. There’s a TV against the far wall, by the door, and thin book cases on either side. A pile of pillows in various colors flows off one side of the couch, a fall of fabric.

Up the stairs, painted dull green, Keith reveals another bathroom and two rooms, one with an open door that looks like a study, another room that’s closed. The walls are a pale grey, almost a sliver, and the curtains on the one window are pale red.

“My uncle is color blind.” Keith explains, and that makes a little more sense, all the slightly off colors. There’s another room on the opposite side of the hall, this door closed too. Keith reaches up to the ceiling, pulling down a drop-ladder that creeks into existence, taking up all the hall. He ascends slightly, then looks over his shoulder, speculative, considering.

“You can come up if you want, but I’m only going to be a moment.”

Shiro shrugs. In for a penny and all that.

He follows Keith up the ladder, emerging into the final floor of the house, a wide attic that spans the space as the living room and the kitchen two floors below. The ceiling is angled on either side, the sides just tall enough that Shiro can feel the tips of his hair brushing the dark painted wood. Above him, clusters of stars move across the paint, highlighting sections where, under scrutiny, Shiro can see swirls of stars painted in, like the plastic stars are pulling themselves out of the mural.

Keith is rummaging around in a wardrobe when Shiro realizes that it’s not just an attic, it’s Keith’s _room_ – that’s his bed in the left-hand corner, a desk beside it, long, squat book case bridging the space between the trap-door and the desk. There are stacks of books everywhere, piled on top of the bookshelf and spilling over. The opposite end of the room is dominated by the wardrobe and a dresser, a laundry basket that’s mostly empty, a rack where Shiro can see Keith’s red and black motorcycle leathers, his boots slumped below them.

“Wow.” He says, taking it all in – from the stars to the dark purple carpet at his feet.

“Hmm? Oh - ” Keith emerges abruptly, and Shiro is struck by the sight of him. Standing straight Keith is illuminated by the half-circle window behind him, where, for the first time in a week, the sun has broken through the cloud cover and caught on the gentle waves of his hair, the sharp line of his jaw, his cheekbone. His eyes are in shadow and his mouth is hitched up at the side in bemusement.

“I found them. Let’s go.” He says, moving forward, out of the tableau. Shiro shakes himself and backs down the ladder, trying to stifle the strange tingling sensation that has sprung up across his neck and shoulders.

In the living room, after they’ve slipped back into their shoes, Keith holds a book out to him, eyes turned away toward the couch. “This for you,” he says, and there’s a blush high on his cheeks. “I’ve had it for a while, and I think it’s a good foundation for what we’ve been talking about.”

Shiro takes it gently, turning it over in his hands. It’s one of the old style books, where the only embellishment on its cover is the title. _Spell and Rune Paradigm Alteration Theory: Volume I_ it reads in faded gold. The cover is rough in his hands, and he can see the places where Keith’s hands have rubbed the cover raw, the thick fabric scruffy.

It’s… it means a lot more than someone giving him a book on battle magic, that’s for sure. Shiro’s been interested in what Keith has been teaching him because it’s genuinely fascinating, but it’s almost like a hobby, rather than a job. He’s not imaginative enough to pull some of the stunts Keith or Katie does with their magic, and it means a lot to him that Keith, who takes his tutoring of both Katie _and_ Shiro very seriously, would give him something to help boost something he knows Shiro’s not pursuing as a career.

“Thank you.” He mumbles, and holds the book close to his chest. He knows, now, why Keith wouldn’t look at him. The moment feels too soft, too intimate, and now that he’s in the middle of it Shiro doesn’t know how to get out. Keith mutters something like _no problem_ , but Shiro is battling the warm thing in his chest again, and they leave the house in silence.

The ride to Katie’s is strangely quiet, even when Keith goes faster than he should, and all Shiro can do is cling to him, wishing that it wasn’t the helmet that was pressed against his cheek but the strong curve of Keith’s back.

.x.

Katie passes the first quarter with, if not flying colors, at least fewer explosions and an exponentially stronger grasp on transmutation. Professor Haggar commends both her and Keith on a job well done after their final, and when Katie turns to him to invite him to her house for an end-of-finals get together he can’t decline. It’s taken all of his guile and cunning to keep from staying for dinner every night they’ve had tutoring, and even then, it was only because he brought his own sometimes, and ate while they worked.

“Of course, let me drop by my place first.” He says, internally folding his anxiety and dread into smaller and smaller ribbons, packing them neatly away. There’s no real reason for him to _not_ go, after all, what with Katie’s exponential growth as a trasmutationist and his, at least, tentative friendships with her friends and family.

He spends an inordinate amount of time just pacing his room, fighting to keep his emotions manageable. It’s been almost a full week since his last attempt at unraveling the secret of Shiro’s arm, and although the other magician hasn’t said anything about it, he’s sure that he can see the paradigm beginning to fade where it’s been scarred into the stump of Shiro’s arm. There’s no way to _tell_ that he’s been tampering with the magic involved either, so there’s no reason to feel so nervous.

 _There’s no way anyone would know I’ve been trying to fix it_. He reasons, taking deep, chest aching breaths until he almost feels lightheaded.

There’s no way for anyone to know. He’ll be fine.

.x.

“He doesn’t look good.” Lance tells Katie, standing to one side of the living room while their friends mill about. Katie’s parents have already greeted everyone and gone off on their own date night, so the room is populated mostly by Katie and Matt’s friends, with the notable exception of Allura, who’s talking to Shiro and one of Katie’s spell-lab partners, and Keith, who’s been a semi-consistent presence at Matt’s side since the night started.

Lance, of course, means Keith, who’s paying so much rapt attention to what Hunk’s saying – something about quantum fields and mineral tracking, or something, Katie can’t quite read his lips – that it looks like he might pull a muscle. No one else has noticed, or if they have they haven’t commented about it, but Keith looks so uncomfortable that it’s making _Katie_ anxious.

“I don’t know why he’s not with Shiro.” She says, and they nod together in confusion. If Keith were with Shiro then Shiro could have him laughing in moments, tension a thing of the past.

But Shiro’s been with Allura all night, and, once Katie starts thinking about it, Keith’s been avoidant of _both_ of them since he got to the party. She doesn’t even think that they’ve said two words beyond their initial introductions.

She sighs, too exhausted post finals to deal with the drama of people who could very well be her teachers. “Let’s just… let him be.” She says, and takes a fast, bracing swig of her soda. Lance shrugs and goes off to join Hunk and Matt, verbally poking at Keith as he goes.

Katie can’t help but wonder if there’s something about Allura that has Keith on edge, only she can’t for the life of her imagine what it might be. Allura is kind, easy to talk to even though she’s got steadfast opinions, and is generally all around a good person. But, the more Katie watches, the more she sees that every time Keith looks like he wants to say something to Shiro, or join Shiro’s group, he stops himself, eyes unerringly finding the tall Altean diplomat in their midst.

 _Is it because he’s Galran?_ She wonders. She still hasn’t been able to ask, but the more she’s been observing him during their study sessions the more she thinks she’s right. Altea had lead the fight against the Galran uprising, and had been the hand that had successfully smothered it in it’s infancy before Zarkon could ignite an all-out war between the Galrans and the other two races.

Facing Allura might be like looking into the face of not only the people the Galrans had killed – their terror had been widespread and vicious, if brief – but at the face of the people who’d driven the Galra back across the mountains. If what Katie was hypothesizing was true, then those Galra that remained in society were hidden away, layered so thickly in concealment and camouflage spells that it would take some kind of completely transformative spell casting to reveal them.

She swallows, looking away from her tutor and back to Shiro, who’s gaze has wandered. Keith had relaxed a little at Lance’s predictable, prickly presence, and Katie can see the way _Shiro_ sees that, the way his gaze turns at once longing and refrained.

 _Adults are ridiculous_ , she decides, and moves away to find Anita and Helen among the party goers.

.x.

“Be careful this quarter. The transmutation classes will be entering advanced form alteration practice, and I know you’ve been helping Miss Holt with similar things.”

Keith nods, attention moving from his reading to his uncle’s face.

Thace looks worn, the grey in his hair more prominent now than the last time he’d been home. Keith wants, suddenly, desperately, to ask if he’s seen King Regent Alfor, or if Allura has been the one at the Galran Peace Negotiations.

But the look on Thace’s face isn’t a good one, and it means, most likely, that the United Races Council is still wary of opening the borders between Galra and the rest of the world. Keith and Thace have been living under government supervision long enough for him to know that few other members of their race would be willing to put up with the secrecy, the forced disguises, or even the strict emotional control practices that Keith had had to undergo when he’d moved across the border.

It had been doubly hard, too, being the son of a traitor, but he’d been young enough that he’d been ‘pardoned’. Lotor had not had it so easy, and, if his letters to Keith were anything to go by, he was finding their home country just as stifling as Keith had found his government mandated check-ins when he was younger.

“Been talking with Professor Haggar?” He asks instead, and Thace nods, continuing to remove his shoes and jacket at the door.

“Your brother sends his regards, by the way, for maintaining your position in school.” The look that Thace gives him means that Lotor had said something about ‘maintaining Galran excellence’, a phrase he’d taken to using whenever he was particularly incised about the state of legal affairs between countries.

“I’ll write him soon.” Keith replies. “How long are you home for?”

“Only a few days.” The set to Thace’s shoulders is tense, and Keith looks away. “The United Races Council has been making favorable noises in regards to trade routes, and Sendak wants me to come back as quickly as I can.”

Keith nods, listening absently to Thace’s heavy tread up the stairs and then into the bathroom. The shower turns on soon after, and it’s only then that Keith lets his book fall against his chest, eyes closed and heart heavy.

It’s hard to remember that Arus isn’t his only worry, that Katie’s slowly diminishing propensity for explosions isn’t his greatest fear and his largest roadblock.

Half his family remains beyond the mountains that separates Galra from the nations of Alteans and humans, but Keith wouldn’t bring Lotor to his home even if he had the chance.

Lotor, at least, is able to walk freely among their people, proud or at least unconscious of his facial markings and white hair, the pale-violet of his skin no different or more unusual than the cheek markings of an Altean, or freckles on a human.

Keith would give anything to look in the mirror and see the face he was born with looking back.

.x.

The quarter progresses, and as it does, a storm builds over Arus, making the air heavy and the winds cold. No rain falls, but Keith can feel the pressure of the weather on him at every moment, like an omen. He trades curious, worried looks with Haggar when they look out her window at the sky, but there are no words for the dread Keith feels building inside him.

.x.

“Are you sure?” Katie asks from the opposite side of the paradigm, thin, glowing lines spider-webbing across the layered circles before her. This is their fifth attempt at transforming the magical ashes of a wand tree into magically receptive stones, and Katie _still_ isn’t sure she’ll be able to get the smell of swamp mud out of her clothes, even two weeks after that failed attempt.

In front of her Keith nods, wand raised, the pale bone glowing in the light of their transmutation rings. She can’t see any hesitation in his face, despite the magnitude of their project. They’ve been taking this slowly since it’s been such a drain on both their magics, but the deadline for Professor Haggar’s homework is quickly approaching, and Keith had insisted that they hurry their progress, even though their last try had been only two night previously.

“Go.” He says, sliding into the first wand motion, a light trail following.

 _One, two, three -_ and her wand drops, and they begin.

Light spools around them, pale green and vivid red, and as their wands dance and swing through the air the runes drawn onto floor begin to glow. They move from one side to the other, until the red half of the circle meets with the green, and the the spider lines start to glow too. Katie looks up at Keith from where she’s been staring at the runes, a smile spreading across her face. Keith, wand bouncing along like a conductor, smiles back. The magic is so thick that the air between them shivers, thick against her skin despite the protective lines drawn between her and the transmutation. She can feel the transmutation pulling power from the runes and from her, like a vacuum sucking at her skin, and her magic feeds into it, following the spells.

Out of the corner of her eye Keith’s form wavers and twists, but she assumes it’s just the pull of the transmutation, the spell fighting for more power.

“ _Allym ashaim!_ ” They cast together, wands striking down at the same time. The material between them surges together, light flashes, and Katie has to bring an arm up to shield her eyes. The scent of crushed roses fills her nose.

When she opens her eyes again the center of the paradigm is filled with small red gems. The chalk lines have stopped glowing, and when she passes a hand in front of her the protective barrier is gone and she can move forward.

She falls to her knees at the small pile of gems analyzing them critically before picking one up.

“It’s solid!” She laughs, holding it out for Keith to see. It’s been a week since they first produced anything that looked like a gem, but they’d been soft to the touch and had broken into a viscous liquid when she’d tried to pick them up. But when she looks up it’s not Keith looking back at her. It doesn’t look like Keith at all.

He’s taller than Keith, by at least a half-foot. His face is narrower, more feline, and a purple so dark he’s almost midnight-black. Yellow on yellow eyes look out at her over a pursed mouth, and, at the side of his head, two large, tufted ears lay against his head.

“Keith?” She asks, hand curling, ready to summon her wand back from her pocket. She thinks – she’s been reading – she suspected, but it’s still different than living, breathing proof.

There’s a long pause, and it’s unnerving because Katie’s  _sure_ that he’s scrutinizing her, cataloging the muscle ticks in her face, the position of her hand. But she can’t  _see_ him do it, can’t track the motion of his eyes when the color of his sclera, his iris and his pupil are so similar in color. There are just two unfathomable eyes staring at her, his face perfectly unmoving before he says, “Yes.” And then it  _is_ Keith, Keith’s mouth twitching up into a rueful smile, his big, strange ears cocking unevenly. “Now you know.”

.x.

“My parents were killed in Gaesan.” He tells her, sitting on the couch in her basement. Their manufactured rubies sit in front of them, and Keith talks as he sorts the imperfect ones from the pile. “I was adopted by my uncle, and when I came here Professor Haggar agreed to keep an eye on me.”

Katie doesn’t ask about the other Galran students she thinks she’s seen. She knows the history everyone knows, about how Zarkon had rallied the Galran people against the the system, against the way the Galrans had been treated, and how quickly it had failed.

Keith hasn’t changed back yet, and Katie is fascinated by his fingers: the long claws, the soft, thick callous on the underside of his fingers, like a cat’s paw.

“Do you have questions?” He asks, and Katie’s been watching him enough to be able to see the slight color change between iris and sclera. Keith watches her from the corner of his eye.

“What magic are Galrans better at?” She blurts, and Keith blinks before huffing a laugh. It’s been a half hour since Keith’s disguise had been stripped away by the transmutation spell, and she’s watched the tension slowly uncoil from him since her initial reaction to his change. He’s still Keith, still her friend – he just looks different.

“Transmutation, generally.” He says, handing her several ‘perfect’ gems. “Fire is a common Galran bond, and it influences our magics. Our transformations are very thorough,” He explains. “But much of our magic is intuitive. It’s hard for me to explain how I know something works, I just  _know_ that it will, or that it won’t.”

“Which is why you go to school, so you can apply words to the things you feel?” Katie guesses.

He nods. “Exactly.”

They go like that for a while, trading questions -  _What magic are you bad at? Tradition seems to be a big part of Galran magic, how so? What’s the second most common bond? What’s the least common?_ \- and answers, sorting gems as they go -  _prayer charms, or spells for luck. I’m a lot better at combat things - impulse traps, too. Tradition is… we feel it, in our bones. It’s like the intuition, it’s part of it. Magical geneticists think it’s something like genetic memory? I don’t know. The most common bond is fire - the stereotype that Galrans use emotional magic, are driven by emotion, that’s true. Least common bond? Earth, probably. Stability, the lack of - of rage? Not the most common traits, I’d think._

There’s no telling how much time has passed when there’s a sharp knock on the door and Shiro’s voice going, “Katie? You done with your homework?” She has just barely had time to draw her wand when Shiro opens the door and Keith is goes still at her side.

She doesn’t know who screams, but there’s a flash of purple and then silence.

.x.

“No Galran is allowed across the border.” Shiro repeats for the ninth time, staring at Keith. They’ve been sitting in Katie’s basement since Shiro flipped his lid and cast a stunning spell at Keith, who’d fallen right off the couch and onto the floor without so much as a peep.

Now, with Keith seated opposite Shiro and Katie between them, he doesn’t feel half as relaxed as he had been when it was just Katie. He’d been torn between ecstasy and terror when he’d felt the transmutation paradigm tear away his magical disguise, but now he just feels terrible. Shiro has been looking at him like he’s some sort of science experiment, or a creature from the sea, and Katie has been wringing her wand in her hands in agitation, hair fluffed up with frustrated magic.

He doesn’t want to admit to lying to Katie, but he hasn’t been able to give Shiro a proper answer about how he’s been living in the country, and Shiro knows too much from Allura to take any story about immigration at face value.

“I’m sorry, Katie.” he says, and it’s so strange to feel his ears react to that, to feel fur on his arms and claws on his hands. He, Thace and Haggar had been confined by transmutation paradigms, and it was only because he and Katie had been working on them that Keith’s had been ripped away.

“When I told you that my parents had died in Gaesan I was lying.” He doesn’t look up to see Katie’s face, he can tell, can _feel_ , that she’s stricken. “My mother was killed in Gaesan, in a riot. My father was sentenced to execution by the United Races Counsel.”

Shiro gasps, but it’s Katie’s whispered exclamation of ‘ _Zarkon!’_ that has him hunching in on himself, fighting the rise of emotions he’d been in control of only hours before. The paradigm that had made him human had made it easier to compartmentalize, to be in control – now he feels like a whirlwind has ripped through him, and all his carefully sliced feelings are gushing everywhere.

“I was adopted by my uncle, the ambassador of the Galran nation.” He looks briefly up at a place close to Shiro’s shoulder. “You may have heard your cousin talk about him – Thace handles most diplomatic relations between the Galran nation and Altea.”

He swallows, fighting the urge to put his head in his hands, to cry, to lash out. _There’s nothing worse than this_ , he thinks, _nothing_ , and in that moment, it’s true. Weeks spent alone in his quiet house; the transmutation paradigm that had kept his magic and his emotions in check; the sting of Lotor’s jealousy in every letter he gets, no matter how infrequent – nothing compares to the mangled swirl of emotions he can feel now, the surprise fear anger disgust confusion – all of it pressing into his fur like lead, smothering.

“Are you - ” it’s Shiro, voice choked on something Keith can’t name, “are you a political prisoner?”

The sound that bursts from his mouth is almost a laugh, and when he looks up at Shiro it feels like his heart is being torn from his chest.

“What do you think?”

.x.

Shiro…

Shiro is a mess. And he doesn’t even really know why.

He and Katie have agreed to keep Keith in her basement until they can reconstruct some kind of paradigm to make him look human again, even if it’s not like the transmutation that he’d had before. But beyond making the decision to keep him down there and to help him, Shiro doesn’t really know what to do.

He doesn’t know what to feel, either, and that’s worse.

Mentally, logically, he knows it’s still Keith, that the only thing that’s changed is how the other man looks, not how he feels or acts or thinks.

But emotionally Shiro feels – betrayed, almost. Like the person he knew, or had thought he’d known, has been taken away from him, and in his place is this imposter.

New-Keith has parts of the Keith that Shiro had been growing to l- like. He has Keith’s voice, and Keith’s gentle way of handling things, and Keith’s wry, rapier wit. He doesn’t treat Katie any differently than he did before, or teaching her, and has agreed to everything they’ve suggested that he’s found reasonable. He fought them on staying in her basement, but there’s no way to transport him from Katie’s house to his house just yet. It’s only been hours, but he’s calmed down somewhat, or returned to the calm he’d had before the accident, and Shiro’s grateful.

Because Shiro and Katie might be panicking, just a little.

“You know technically he’s royalty.” Katie hisses at him in her room, pouring over transmutation books and the notes Keith has been giving her since the start of the year. “Zarkon was King Regent of Galra, or the Galran Equivalent of it, before he tried to start a war.” She spins to stare at him, eyes wide with the intensity of her knowledge. “We have a _royal political hostage_ in my _basement!_ ”

From his place on her bed Shiro just closes his eyes, fighting the urge to rip up all the carefully written notes spread out before him. They’re Keith’s carefully color coded and diagramed, and he doesn’t want – he can’t – _they’re Keith’s_.

It’s a flying shame that he and Katie had only just started working on advanced transfigurations, but New-Keith has already told them that his uncle – the very same one Shiro’s heard Allura arguing with her dad about – is back at the United Race Counsel and that Professor Haggar can’t be made aware of the situation because she reports directly to the government regrading Galran students, and they’d likely be able to pull the information from her mind if they suspected any mishaps with Keith.

“We don’t have to transfigure him.” Shiro says, glaring down at the notes. He wishes, briefly, that his elemental bond was with fire, because his glare would be a lot more effective then. “We just have to hide him.”

“ _Shiro!_ ” Katie whirls on him so fast that he’s surprised she doesn’t snap something. There’s an electricity in her eyes that makes him worried.

“You’re a _genius!_ ” She gushes, racing over to her bookshelves to pull down several thin volumes and one monstrous green tome. “Neither of us are good enough to transfigure him, not in a way that would be reversible. We’d probably kill him if we tried.”

Shiro’s stomach turns at that, knotting up and growing spikes. He can’t imagine losing Keith – not ‘new’, really, because there’d only ever been just the one – and especially not to something as permanent as death. He’d just started really opening up to Shiro, trusting him with little things like willing touches and smiles and _gifts_ , and Shiro couldn’t bare the idea that all of that would be snatched away because he and Katie couldn’t do the right transfiguration paradigm.

“But!” She continues, dumping the books on her bed beside Shiro and effectively smothering Keith’s notes. She opens each of them at random, skimming page numbers until she finds what she wants and then moves on. “But we can hide him from people who would hurt him, and that’s the important part. Look,” she says, and brings a book up so fast that Shiro has to push it away from his face to make the words clear.

_The Cozza’q paradigm – or Chetta’tiik paradigm, depending on region – can be used in tandem with a spell-net to create a three-dimensional illusion, effectively a mirage, that can only be removed with the correct counter paradigm._

“So we pair this - ” she points to the Cozza’q paradigm, “with this - ” an image of an amulet engraved with a rune Shiro’s never seen before, “and _this_ ,” a dagger this time, on the page no bigger than Shiro’s hand, “and then _Keith_ is the one in control of his appearance, he’s not locked into one anymore.”

Shiro blinks at her, his mind blank. He knew, in the way everyone who knew Katie knew, that she was a genius, that her ability to make huge leaps in magical understanding was what had her racing up the ranks in Arus University. It was the whole reason Keith was such a huge part of their lives in the first place, rather than just another face in their classes.

But being faced with Katie’s genius is a completely different thing entirely. It would have taken Shiro _weeks_ to think to partner these paradigms and runes, and there’s no way that he would be as confident in his affirmation of it working as Katie is then, looking at him with such determination in her eyes that Shiro can’t help but feel like yeah, they can make it work.

“Okay.” He says, hopping of the bed. Katie follows, grabbing the books as she goes. “Let’s show Keith.”

.x.

“You’re insane.” Is what he says when Katie presents him with her idea. “One hundred percent.”

He’s curled up on a couch, as far away from the transmutation circle as he can be, knees pulled up to his chin and ears flopped down. He looks sad, and small, and Shiro wants desperately to wrap him up in his arms and convince him that they’re going to make it okay.

But Keith can barely look at Katie, eyes always dancing up and away, and he hasn’t looked at Shiro since the reveal. He flinches when they get to close, ears flattening against his head, and he only seems to relax when they’re across the room from him.

“It will work.” Katie insists, shoving a book at him. “You were the one who told me to follow my own lines, Keith, and I’m going to. I’m going to _make this work_.”

His eye flick up, liquid gold and so, so tired, before he glances away again. With a sigh he says, “If I don’t go back to my house in five days the wards will activate and let the government know, and they’ll come looking for me. You could be found guilty of kidnapping a political figure, or for harboring a terrorist.”

It looks for a moment like Katie is going to smack him with a book, but she huffs angrily instead and says, “I’m going to do it, and you’re going to teach me about form transmutation when this is all over, and we’re going to go back to school and _everything will be alright_. I’m _going_ to _make_ it _work_.”

She gathers her books with a flick of her hand and storms out, dragging Shiro with her.

.x.

That first night, after Keith has been given several blankets and a pillow to sleep with, he finds himself wandering.

Not physically or mentally, but magically.

_In his mind’s eye he can see the floor plan of Katie’s house, can see the bond-lights that indicate Matt, Lance, Hunk, Shiro and Katie. He doesn’t know if she’s told the others of Keith’s secret, but since Lance hasn’t barged through the door to see him he imagines not._

**_She might have to, to complete her project_ ** _he realizes, and the magic in him flutters like it’s nervous._

_Instead of paying it any mind, however, he moves towards Shiro, and Shiro’s strange, fascinating arm._

_Over the course of the quarter Keith has made decent progress on unraveling the magic within it. There’s no red cloud at its base anymore, and he’s trimmed out much of the yellow lightning that had speared out from Shiro’s stump. Now, the largest mass that remains is the purple, and it’s been fighting him since he started working on it._

_Every time he touches it with his magic it screams, and every time this happens he gets knocked from the magical plane and back into his body. It’s been a long time since he’s needed the spells to call himself home and to keep from getting lost, but there’s no paradigm or rune that can save him from the ferocious push of the arm against him. That part of the arm, he rationalizes, exists mostly in the magical realm._

_Which means the best way to attack it would be in the physical world, where it’s weak._

_Unfortunately_ , he thinks, settling back into his body and the couch, _there’s very little chance of Shiro letting me get my hands on it, now that I have claws_.

There’s always been talk between the races, about magical affinity and connection. Humans are, by far, the ones most divorced from nature – fae ancestry or not, human magic is the least intuitive of the three races, and the one most reliant on spells, runes, and paradigms.

Alteans were closer, were possibly the perfect combination of connected and disconnected, landing right in the middle. Altean magicians could do emotional magic and paradigm magic, although few tried now, what with the taboo connotations of blood magic and willed magic.

It was Galrans, the most beastly and the least able to bend from their traditions, that completed the spectrum. If humans were too divorced from magic to be able to rely on it without runes, Galrans were too close to it to it to utilize runes or spells or paradigms without years of practice. Galran magic drew from the core of the self, the magic well that existed in all magical beings. But unlike humans, Galrans didn’t need an outside impetus to pull their magic out – many Galrans didn’t even have _wands_. It had been adopted when they became a popular focus for magical intent, but Galran magicians had been doing magic for centuries without them, and the wand itself changed very little for the magician involved.

And now that Shiro _knew_ Keith was a practitioner of taboo magics, there is little doubt in Keith’s mind that Shiro will stay as far away from him as possible.

Especially since the arm itself is made from Galran magic.

.x.

Katie almost doesn’t go to school the last two days of the week, so intent is she on figuring out how to make Keith’s protective shield actually _work_ that everything else gets pushed to the back burner. It’s Shiro who convinces her to go, if only to keep up her attendance and to get the homework, but she doesn’t pay attention in any of her classes. She’s too busy devouring the few books she has that she _thinks_ can help them with their problem to notice what is or isn’t being said, and it’s only by virtue of setting up a simple recording spell that she even keeps up with the lectures.

At home she disappears into the basement the minute she gets back and doesn’t emerge until dinner, and then sometimes hours after it’s gone cold. Shiro has taken up residence in one of their guest rooms, and with Matt gone attempting to pin down his major adviser on their sabbatical there’s no one to be suspicious of him basically never leaving the Holt home.

He can’t bring himself to visit Keith when Katie is there, working tirelessly on the aspects of the project he can’t help with, but he tries to keep the other man company while she’s away.

“Do you remember your home?” He asks on the second day. Katie is in class for another two hours, and Shiro has been instructed to weave spell-nets while she’s gone. Keith, unable to assist without tainting the magic involved, watches from his couch.

“Galra?” His voice is dull, and when Shiro looks up at him his attention is only on the glowing threads spooling out from Shiro’s wand. “Only a little. I was seven when Zarkon was captured. Part of the agreement that kept the Altean and human militaries out of Galra was my living here.”

That – he and Katie had suspected as much, what with the complexity of the magic that had been wrapped around Keith. But what really hits Shiro isn’t the sadness of the situation, but Keith’s word choice. _Zarkon_ , not _father_ , not _dad_.

Shiro hums, biting his lip while he works. It’s – he still hurts, he still aches for his parents, but…

“My parents,” he starts, focusing intently on the spell-nets. He’s been doing it for several hours, and the motions have grown repetitive enough that he could look at Keith if he wanted to. “My parents were killed in the Kerberos attack.”

Keith doesn’t say anything, doesn’t make any noise, but there’s a weight on Shiro’s shoulders that he _knows_ is Keith looking at him. He keeps going.

“I was ten, and with Allura at the time, in the capital.” The spell-nets weave together, folding into bolts and bolts of thing, glowing mesh. “I saw it happen on the news.”

It had been the largest Galran attack, with Zarkon at its head. Even the bombardment on Balmera had been less devastating than the attack on Kerberos – thousands of people, lost in an instant of concentrated Galran magic. The emotional imprint was still so strong in Kerberos that the city couldn’t be lived in, and the only people equipped to move through it were specially guarded scientists.

“I wanted to talk to them.” He says, and it comes out so – _weak_. It comes out weak and Shiro hates it, hates the way he can’t seem to get past _my parents are gone I miss them I fucked up I’ll never be the same they would be so disappointed I miss them I miss them I miss them._ “I wanted to talk to them so badly, but there are no spells for summoning a spirit without using transmutation.” He swallows. “And the strongest transmutations are Galran.”

He can remember it as clearly as if it just happened, can see the transmutation paradigm on the floor of Matt’s attic, the chalk lines brilliantly white against the dark wood. He can see Matt, wand at the ready, looking at Shiro with such determination that it almost makes him want to stop, say _no, we can’t, we know we’re not ready_.

But they’d tried – tried the incantation, done the wand movements, ignited the runes at the right time.

“I thought I saw them.” He whispers. His wand has stopped moving, and he doesn’t know when that happened. There’s still no noise from Keith, just the faint chirping of the spell-nets as the chords rub together.

“I crossed the barrier.” He says, and he can hear Keith’s gasp.

.x.

_The paradigm pulses pale blue, a pillar of light that blinds Shiro and Matt the first moments it springs into being. He can feel the paradigm quake and twist beyond the protective circle of his position, trying to pull on his magic to stabilize it._

_“What’s happening?” Matt yells, trying to be heard over the racing winds that fill the attic. “I can’t see!”_

_Shiro can’t either, what with his arm across his face._

_But he can hear, and it’s more than the wind that fills his ears._

_“Shiro? Shiro, baby is that you? Come here!”_

_He gasps, squinting past his arm as he looks into the light. He sees – hands, the outline of hands, and his mother’s face over them, her eyes kind, lit by the pillar of the summoning._

_“Come here Shiro, I missed you.” She says, and at her side the image of his father pulls itself free of the swirling blue light. He smiles, crooked and happy, and holds out his hands like his wife does._

_“Come to us Shiro, we’ve been waiting for you for so long.”_

_He doesn’t notice when his arm drops, or when his wand falls from his fingers. He doesn’t notice Matt screaming to the side, banging against the barrier that separates them, crying in frustration. Matt can’t see what Shiro sees, which is something he learns later; Matt sees only the pillar of light, the wind tearing through the attic, and a dark shadow waiting just beyond the paradigm line._

_Shiro’s hand passes through the invisible wall that protects him from the center of the paradigm and then there’s only screaming pain, a vicious pulling on his arm where his parents have wrapped their hands around his skin, their grip burning into him, burning his arm away. The flesh turns black under their touch, then crumbles, vanishing into the light. He watches in horror, struggling against their pull, his left hand sliding against the barrier._

_“HELP ME!” He screams, watching his arm turn to ashes in the phantom grasp of his parent’s images. There’s a shudder from the barrier, like a living shiver, and then it snaps shut **through** his arm, just above the farthest reach of the discoloration. The faces of his parents, perpetually placid and unchanged, fade away, but it’s a long time before Shiro can shake the feeling of their hands gripping his arm._

_When the barrier finally drops and he falls to his knees, Matt is there, crying, gripping his wand so tight Shiro thinks, dazedly, that he might break it. There’s a light Shiro doesn’t understand reflecting off Matt’s tear streaked faced, but he can’t hold on to the image, can barely hold on to himself and it’s not long before darkness steals his vision._

.x.

“I woke up with the arm.” He says, and he doesn’t know when his eyes closed, but when he opens them he looks up, needing to find Keith’s eyes. The Galran stares back at him with an impenetrable gaze, but Shiro knows Keith well enough to see the grief and sympathy on his face.

For a long time Keith says nothing, and Shiro goes back to weaving spell-nets. Katie will want them to be ready when she gets home, and Shiro needs something to occupy his hands so that he can ignore their shaking.

“I knew.” Keith whispers. “That first time, when I saw your arm. I knew.”

Shiro closes his eyes, wand following the motions without pausing.

“I’ve been trying for weeks to fix it for you.”

His head snaps up at that, wand stilling, mouth dropping open. Keith has one of the blankets wrapped around his hands, his huge ears tilted down and away. He looks ashamed, like he’s waiting for Shiro to yell at him, but Shiro can barely find air, let alone words.

“For weeks. I went – Galrans can – I worked it out on the magical plane.” He says, like it’s nothing, like _astral projection_ isn’t something that leaves magicians trapped every day when it’s not executed right. “But I haven’t been able to finish. The last part – it has to be done here.”

He looks up then, big, liquid yellow eyes under long lashes, ears practically flat against his hair, hands twisted up in fabric, probably to keep Shiro from seeing him fidget. Shiro wants to kiss him, to hug him, to spin him around in a circle for _years_ until he’s finally expended all the boiling energy that’s suddenly sprung up inside him.

 _“You can fix me?”_ He asks, and it’s barely more than a whisper, caught between hope and years of failures. Keith looks at him, sad eyes and big ears and a rueful smile, and says,

“Yeah. I think I can.”

.x.

Keith explains what he has to do to fix Shiro’s arm, drawing out the paradigms with his wand, explaining how he magic weaves together to create a barrier, and then to carefully section off the trauma-summon from Shiro’s real arm. Shiro watches, rapt, as little projections of his arm and the magical barrier – a box, essentially – act out what Keith wants to do, and how he wants to do it.

“I can’t bring your arm back.” He says, hands wrapped around his wand. “I can’t make that happen for you. But if I can get rid of this, a new arm can be made, one that doesn’t feed on terror.”

He looks so hopeful that for the first time in years Shiro feels hopeful too. The only problem is that they can’t do it right then; Shiro isn’t ambidextrous, and he needs his dominant hand to do the spell work necessary to re-disguise Keith.

When Katie gets home the first thing he does is sweep her into his arms, spinning her around the living room. Matt’s still away – apparently hiking through all of the coastal Netherlands in search of his major adviser. _“It’s not even that much coastline, where did he go!”_ He’d complained during his last phone call. Lance and Hunk had class for another hour and a half yet, leaving Shiro free to express his excitement.

“Whoa - ” Katie yells, gripping the straps of her backpack tighter while Shiro spins, carefully trying to avoid the furniture in the living room.

“Keith says he can fix my arm!” He says, fighting not to yell. “He says he’s been working on it for a while but now he can really fix it!”

“ _WHAT!_ ” Katie shouts, leaning back to look Shiro in the eye. “That’s amazing! What does he mean he’s ‘been working on it?’”

Shiro drops her down to the floor, holding onto her shoulders and practically vibrating with excitement.

“He’s been astral-projecting to fix it, because he didn’t know how to ask.”

Katie looks… equal parts miffed and curious, and she trots off down the stairs without so much as a backwards glance. Shiro follows close behind, still brimming with excitement but also ready to get back to work on the protective enchantments that will give Keith control over when he looks human. They’re _so close_ , all they have to do is put all of the piece together.

That’s also going to be the hardest part.

.x.

Katie gives him a half hour long lecture on the dangers of magic in the spirit plane – he’s aware – asking for permission – there were _extenuating circumstances!_ – and fucking with magic he isn’t used to.

“What if we’d lost you forever, huh?” She asks, just about ready to fling curses at him. “What would we do then?”

And Keith – Keith doesn’t have anything to say to that, because he doesn’t have any words; and he doesn’t have any words because there’s no air in his lungs, because he’s sure that Katie doesn’t realize that _no one_ would have cared six months ago if he’d gone and gotten himself lost somewhere in a place most people couldn’t even look. Thace would have noticed, and Lotor, and _maybe_ Haggar, but all of them were so busy with their own lives – and even though Thace lived with him they still didn’t see each other for huge stretches of time, sometimes months on end. Keith wasn’t sure if he would be able to recognize Lotor on the street, and Haggar was so closely watched by the government that it would be impossible for her to go looking for him herself.

He looks down and away, unable to meet the fierce, desperate fire in Katie’s eyes. He doesn’t feel like he can speak, and when he doesn’t answer within an acceptable amount of time Katie just throws her hands up and stalks away, summoning things to her side as she goes, getting ready to work.

.x.

“I’m sorry.” Keith says the next day, standing in front of Katie while she draws a sharp-edged rune on the inside of Keith’s right arm. It stings, etching into his skin, but he doesn’t cast an anesthetic spell while she does it, or even after, when it’s just her wand resting against his skin.

Katie looks up at him, eyes warm but hard, and Keith has to look at her chin instead.

“Good.” Is all she says, before passing her hand over the thin, raised pink lines that have scarred onto his arm. A chill spreads beneath her hand, and by the time she’s done he can’t feel it at all.

“Now for the fun part!” She calls out, clapping her hands together. From his place by the spell nets, Shiro jumps, cursing when he has to rethread a length of net where it’s got a funny hitch. “Layering!”

Keith groans, rubbing his hands across his face. He hates layering.

.x.

Layering is the most complicated part of any endeavor of the magical variety that involves combining different paradigms, runes, or magical applications. It often takes weeks for an experienced magician to layer two different applications (transmutation and hexes, alchemy and traps), for example.

Katie and Shiro, with a little directional help from Keith, attempt to layer three applications in the span of a handful of hours.

.x.

“Put the Cozza’q transmutation on the bottom,” Katie says, pushing the furniture around the room with a few practiced waves of her hand. Keith’s couch goes skidding into the wall and he has to refrain from punching holes in the upholstery with his claws. “We’re gonna have to do a little bit of a balancing act with the Ethursan rune and the Marmoran dagger, but if we do a closed circular orbit we should be able to keep everything under control.”

“Please don’t put me into orbit on accident.” Keith says, having moved to stand in the center of their transmutation paradigm. His feet are bare, and he can feel the chalk and the building power as Shiro closes circles and draws runes.

Katie gives him an ‘of course not’ eyeroll and begins drawing rebound paradigms above the transmutation. When she’s finished she casts one of the spell nets over them, the lines spreading and expanding to connect each paradigm and make a kind of cap over the transmutation circle.

It’s Shiro who does the closed orbit paradigm, a deceptively simple series of concentric circles connected by a handful of array lines. They rotate counter to each other, the inner-most circle tethered to the rune carved into Keith’s body. Shiro spends several minutes drawing the circle around Keith’s wrists that locks the orbit in place, and Keith spends that time fighting off the tide of emotion he can feel from Shiro, attempting to compartmentalize it away.

They spend the next half an hour arranging spell-nets into a dome around the whole transfiguration paradigm, creating spaces where Katie and Shiro can work their incantations without getting in the way of the moving arrays. Shiro splits the orbit, sending the Marmoran dagger spinning into Keith’s space. It stabilizes, hilt facing Keith, and he can see a rune identical to the one on his arm carved into its blade.

When they’re done the room glows with pale green and indigo light, the rune on Keith’s arm humming with power. There’s a weight to the air, a pressure Keith isn’t used to being _aware_ of, like the transmutation is battling the orbit and the nets and the array.

All of the magic, arranged so carefully – one wrong move and, Keith imagines, Shiro won’t be the only one with one arm.

“Ready, Shiro?” Katie calls from her place behind Keith. She and Shiro are anchored by their protective circles, but he can spin, and he turns to look at her, taking in the determination in her eyes, the fierceness of the smile she flashes him, the magic buzzing at the tip of her wand.

Shiro, when Keith turns back to him, is looking at the whole thing like it’s two seconds away from attacking him, and Keith can read the fear rising in him. The light from his arm increases in intensity, but it doesn’t overtake him, doesn’t send him into an anxiety attack or a magically induced rage. Keith’s work keeps it just a bright, frustrated, terror-driven presence at Shiro’s side.

“Shiro.” Keith calls, hoping the other magician isn’t too caught up in his own mind to ignore Keith. It takes a moment, but Shiro tears himself away from his staring contest with the spell-nets to meet Keith’s eyes.

Keith can’t reach out to him normally – the orbit prevents any movement of his dominant arm – but he lifts his left hand anyway, palm up, trying to be comforting. “You can do this. I believe in you.”

Shiro stares at him, eyes flickering all over his face, and then he smiles, hopeful and a little scared. “Thank you.” He says, and Keith’s ears flick all over trying to mask his embarrassment.

“Alright, marshmallows,” Katie calls, making Shiro jump a little bit, “let’s get this show on the road!”

Keith takes a deep, bracing breath, and closes his eyes, praying to deities he hasn’t thought of in years that everything goes well. It has to.

.x.

It goes to shit almost immediately.

Neither Katie nor Shiro can maintain the magical array, the transmutation circle, and the rebound paradigms, not to mention the baker’s dozen of other spells that end up getting cast as they work – a patch to fix a hole the spell nets can’t cover, the power the rune is drawing from all of them, additional layers to the array to keep Keith from spinning out into the wall, a bracing array to keep the dagger from flying off and killing someone.

Keith ends up casting willed magic in thin layers in an attempt to keep from contaminating the whole process, but gives up when it just gets sucked into the transmutation paradigm without actually helping.

 _Stop it!_ He thinks, waving his left hand out wide and then clenching quickly into a fist. A purple bubble expands out from him, encompassing the whole magical affair, clinging and almost crystalline against magic around him. _Be still_. He commands, and the bubble constricts, stabilizing.

“Better?” He asks, and Shiro nods, brow furrowed and sweat beading on his forehead as he and Katie continue to recite the incantation.

There’s nothing for Keith to do but wait and hope that his tampering doesn’t ruin all their hard work and, maybe, send his spirit flying permanently out of his body.

It’s the little things.

.x.

“ _-  eyn alyt nay nahyynlum,_ ” Katie chants, feeling acutely the pain in her arms, her neck, her legs. Her lips feel numb from speaking, but she keeps going. Only a few more lines. “ _Yyna yotta alyt yehhna nahyynlum ah -_ ”

She doesn’t realize when the final _thing_ snaps into place, what word she’s speaking or what wand movement she’s making, but all at once the pace of everything seems to speed up. The arrays quicken, spinning until they’re one band of light, and the cap above everything bares down, pressing in – or being pulled? Katie can’t tell.

There’s a snapping sound, almost a click but not quite, and then Keith _screams_ , but Katie can’t stop talking, can’t leave the incantation hanging, has to keep going even as she sees the dagger fly into Keith’s hand, the rune on its blade glowing white.

“ _– syste ayehtan yehani!_ ” She and Shiro shout, and the whole paradigm heaves, folding up and into itself, with Keith caught in the middle.

“ _NO!_ ” Shiro shouts, reaching forward, but the barrier – Keith’s barrier, not the one from the transmutation, the one that would let you through if you were willing – Keith’s barrier holds, and Shiro sags against the purple magic, beating it with his fists while the light grows brighter and brighter and soon they can’t see anything but the outline of Keith at the center of the paradigm.

Then even that fades.

.x.

Keith wakes up with such at intense itching on his arm that his hand is moving to scratch at it before his eyes are even open. He’s intercepted by someone else’s’ hand, a voice somewhere to his right saying, “No, don’t do that.”

Keith likes that voice. It makes him feel calm, warm, makes part of the itching go away because he’s focused on trying to get his eyes open to see the speaker.

It’s dim in whatever room he’s in, the lights low and the windows closed. It takes a long time for him to focus on the person at his side, but he knows who it is even before the blur leaves his vision.

“Hey,” Shiro says, his features at once clear and muddled to Keith. He sees Shiro’s face, but he sees… _emotions_ in it too, the way worry rests heavy on Shiro’s forehead and shoulders, how hope gathers in his eyes, restraint at his mouth while his throat is alight with excitement. “You’ve been out for a day an a half.”

“Where?” Keith asks, but it’s more a cough than a word. Shiro hands him a glass of water, and Keith takes it, sipping gratefully.

“We brought you back to your house, to see if the wards would recognize you.” Shiro explains. The ceiling, on further consideration, does look familiar. They’re in the living room. “Everything went off without a hitch, apparently. Aside from…” he waves at Keith’s arm, where it’s bandaged from wrist to elbow, over the rune Katie had carved into him.

“What happened?” He asks. He remembers the bubble, a strange _click-shift_ , a searing pain in his arm, and then – nothing.

Shiro looks – a combination of pleased and rueful, and he scratches the back of his neck, and Keith can read _ashamed, proud, wondrous_ all in the bend of his spine.

“So, Katie and I – but definitely ninety-five percent Katie – may have made a new type of binding spell on accident.” He says, all in a rush. _Disbelief_ races from his mouth to his ears, and Keith knows he still can’t believe what he’s saying.

Keith can’t either, really.

“ _What?_ ”

.x.

It started when Katie tried to put three magics that were complete by themselves into one new whole. Most of the time, magic that was layered had naturally occurring openings where other applications could slide in.

Katie had essentially decided to smash three ‘wholes’ together and make them one new whole.

The magic, needlessly to say, had not fallen into place easily.

It had started with the fraying of the spell-nets, and the patches Katie and Shiro had had to make to keep everything moving at the pace they wanted, rather than letting the magic control them. Keith’s stabilizing presence had changed the tone of the magic, almost like he’d polarized it. Because his magic had acted on all parts of the attempted application at once, each part had ‘tuned’ to him. It had functioned, but only insomuch as it had changed the direction of its chaotic attempt at falling apart. Instead of aiming outward, it had turned inward.

Toward Keith.

Without the verbal incantation, he likely would have died. The magic wasn’t directionless, but it was unrestrained, and it had burned into him through the rune in his arm, mitigated only slightly by the presence of the dagger. However, because the incantation had progressed, when it completed the magic had cued in, finally finding a direction.

“And that direction was, _kindof_ , in you. Through you.” Shiro looks sheepish, a blush high on his cheeks and his hand again at the back of his neck.

Keith hesitates. “That… doesn’t make a lot of sense, honestly.” He says, and Shiro sighs, throwing his hands up in the air.

“I know!” He exclaims. “But it’s the only explanation for why you didn’t die, the room didn’t explode, _and_ you look human again.” He sighs, resting his hand back on Keith’s arm, but gently. “And believe me, it’s all we’ve been talking about since we realized we weren’t dead.”

Keith’s silent for a long time, mulling that over. He’ll have to see if he can pull the paradigm out of himself to get a look at it, or find out if he could see it through the astral-plane at all.

“Can I see my arm, at least?” He asks, hoping to find out something more concrete than just ‘new magic lives in you, have fun’.

Magic was such bullshit sometimes.

“Yeah, you’re probably fine.” Shiro says, starting to unwind the gauze. “You just can’t itch it. We tried some anesthetic spells on it, but they just seemed to bounce off.”

The bandages fall away easily, revealing Keith’s pale human arm, exactly the way he remembers it from the first transmutation.

Only now, there’s the rune burned into it, and the vague, symbolic outline of the Marmoran dagger around it. Both scars are black, like ink, but raised – he can feel the ridges when he ghosts his fingers across them. He tries an anesthetic spell, just a slight one, and is surprised when all of the pain leeches away from him, the spell vanishing quickly after.

“I think…” Keith says, pressing down on the runes more firmly. Nothing, not even a twinge. “I think you might have discovered a type of defensive magic.”

.x.

Beyond the initial pain from the rune, Keith claims he isn’t tired, and he insists on getting to work on Shiro’s arm despite Shiro’s protests that he needs to sleep.

“Nonsense.” Keith says, and waves him away, drawing paradigm after paradigm in the air, looping them through with an array that keeps them orbiting Shiro’s arm while he works.

Honestly, Shiro doesn’t protest too strongly, too enraptured with watching Keith assemble paradigms like they’re nothing, like it doesn’t take Shiro hours of practice to assemble each rune, line, circle pattern. And arrays – the lines of magical script that are sometimes so small they don’t even look like texts at all – Shiro’s trash at those.

But Keith, Keith can do them without consulting books, without checking references, without a floating guideline to try and match.

“You’re amazing.” Shiro says, the words dropping from his mouth like they’re nothing. He didn’t even – he wasn’t _thinking_ – and he can feel the embarrassment crawling up his neck as a flush, is sure it’s reached the pointed tips of his ears already.

Keith – human again, with beautiful violet eyes – looks up through his lashes where he’s drawing paradigms just above Shiro’s palm, hand stalled mid-rune. Shiro watches Keith’s eyes flicker around his face, watches those same eyes widen in realization, and then watches as Keith refocuses on Shiro’s hand, hair hiding his face.

“Thanks. You – you too. Amazing.” Keith stutters out, and Shiro almost misses his ears in that moment, because he’s sure that they’d be all over the place trying not to broadcast Keith’s embarrassment.

Shiro can’t really judge though, and he looks away before he does something stupid like reach out and grab the collar of Keith’s shirt or his shoulder and pull him up for a kiss.

Even if he wants to, really, _really_ badly.

.x.

“Ready?” Keith asks, hands hovering over Shiro’s arm. The purple limb is layered from shoulder to fingertips in a cage of tiny runes and arrays, _too keep any backlash limited to your arm_ , Keith explained when Shiro asked why he was moving beyond the end of the magic.

Shiro swallows, bracing himself. He’s been wanting this since he woke up in the hospital and the thing had been next to him, pulsing violent purple and sending him into a panic attack once he’d registered everything that had happened.

“Yeah.” He says, and Keith smiles at him, reassuring and warm, and then turns his attention to keying in the runes in the right order, chanting as he goes.

Shiro loses himself in Keith’s voice, almost like Keith just speaking is magic, never mind that he’s basically making tuning fork noises, humming at different pitches depending on the rune he’s touching.

It’s just… soothing, listening to him, watching his hands ghost over the glowing red arrays. He thinks, distantly, that he really wants to ask if Keith will breathe fire for him, but now probably isn’t the time.

Keith is about a third of the way through the runes when the arm starts to hum in response, a counter-note to the one Keith is making. Shiro can just barely see him frown, his attention entirely on the arm. It goes from dull, purple-grey to bright white-purple in a handful of seconds, but for once it doesn’t hurt or make him afraid. It’s like it’s separate from him, cut off from his nerves and his emotions.

Keith keeps going, humming the same way he has been for the last fifteen minutes, and the longer he goes for the more Shiro can hear that the arm isn’t keeping up. It starts slowly, the arm keeping time with Keith, but it falters, rune after rune, until the arm is only making one noise, a high wailing that almost sounds like a person crying, or several people moaning in harmony.

“Is that -?” He starts, but Keith is already nodding. Most of the runes he’s pressing now are on Shiro’s hand, and he uses both of his own to do it, eyes tracking only his own movements, completely enraptured in the magic. Shiro’s attention gets dragged back to the arm, the way it’s started pulsing and shaking in the confines of the cage.

The magic starts to dissipate before Keith makes the last few whistles of the tune, the vivid purple fading away until Shiro can see almost completely through it. Keith taps the last three runes at the center of his palm and then – it’s gone.

Keith has banished the arm.

Keith has _banished **the arm.**_

Shiro almost faints when it finally hits him. There’s no more weight on his right side, weight like a constant stone in his soul, like a fog of perpetual sadness. For the first time in almost ten years there’s nothing at the end of Shiro’s stump, the only light coming from the pale red glow of a healing paradigm that Keith is applying while Shiro stares in disbelief.

He reaches out with trembling fingers and just barely brushes the smooth skin of the scar, afraid that contact with the skin will bring the angry-sad arm back from wherever Keith sent it. He jerks back when his fingers don’t meet the semi-solid magical presence of his summoned arm.

There’s _nothing_ there.

“How?” Shiro asks, dragging his eyes away from his halved arm. He’d seen it happen, yes, but it was still almost too much to believe. He and Katie had maybe made a new type of defense magic, but _this_ – Shiro had never let himself hope too hard, not after those first few years. He’d given up on getting it rid of it a long time ago.

And now it was gone. For good, if the smug way Keith was eyeing the healing paradigm was anything to go by.

Keith smiles a little, just a softness as his eyes, the tilt of his lips only barely hanging on at the corners. Shiro’s glad that he got to see Keith as a Galra, because his human face is so completely under his control that Shiro’s amazed at some of the reactions he’s gotten, and how strong they’ve been.

“You wanted it gone for a long time.” Keith says, and – well that’s obvious. Shiro almost says as much, but Keith continues. “The arm was trapped, almost, in a cycle of its own grief. All I did was break the cycle it was in.” Keith scratches the back of his neck, looking away. “I guess you could say I made it move through the stages of grief? I don’t know, it’s hard to pin down with words.”

Shiro – Shiro has no words. Again, Keith has stolen them from him, and all Shiro can do is gape at him, trying to gather some semblance of thought.

He should say thank you, and try to express how much it all means to him, Keith doing this.

He should tell Keith he needs to call Katie and tell her he’s okay.

They need to go to the board of magical review and find out what the _fuck_ they actually did to Keith before he keels over from delayed onset something-or-other.

He does none of those things.

It takes a moment to bridge the gap between them, and even less to send the both of them toppling back onto the couch, Shiro’s extra weight almost sending them sprawling on the floor.

“Whoa – hey, hi, hi.” Keith says, hands on Shiro’s shoulders and it’s – he’s right handed, he did not think this through, but now Keith is below him, and, as Shiro braces himself up on one arm, looking at him with the quiet kind of curiosity and gentleness that Shiro hasn’t seen on any face ever.

“I’d like to kiss you a lot.” Shiro says, because he can’t seem to reinstate a brain to mouth filter and he does, really, want to kiss Keith a lot. Like, relationship kissing. “Like relationship kissing.” Oh, he said that out loud.

“Yeah, sure.” Keith says, still watching his face curiously, and then _his_ brain catches up with his mouth and he goes the color of ripe tomatoes. “I – I mean – yeah. Yes.”

Shiro smiles so widely he’s sure his face will get stuck, but Keith’s sweet, tentative kisses sooth it all away.

.x.

Katie comes back to Keith’s house after school that day hopeful but not anticipating anything amazing. Keith had been really out of it, sleeping like a log when she’d left Shiro in charge of watching him. He hadn’t gotten kicked out of the house when they’d carried him through, though, and the government hadn’t descended on them and carted them away to some magical prison for tampering with a political prisoner _and_ fucking with heretofore unknown magics.

She opens the door as quietly as she can when she gets there, already half way through toeing off her shoes when her eyes finally register that she’s the only one awake in the living room – and that’s not just Keith on the couch.

Shiro has his arm wrapped around Keith, trying to make the most of the couch space not really meant for two people laying down. Keith’s back is against Shiro’s chest, one arm over Shiro’s left, the other supporting his head. They look exhausted, even in sleep – or at least Keith does. The skin around his eyes is dark, bruise purple, and the rest of his face is ashen.

 _He probably did something stupid when he woke up, before they figured out their whole ‘I like you!’ ‘No, I like you!’ thing,_ she reasons, turning away from them to rummage around in the kitchen. She decides to wait it out for when they get up, and makes herself lunch before grabbing a book and a seat in the living room.

It’s only when both Shiro and Keith wake up that Katie sees exactly _how_ crazy Keith decided to be with his magic. Neither of them are spared a lecture, but Katie doesn’t miss the way Shiro’s fingers stay knotted with Keith’s the whole time, or the fight Keith has with himself every few minutes between being tense and stand-offish and relaxed at Shiro’s side.

 _Ridiculous_ , she thinks mid-rant, and just for that thought goes an extra five minutes about magical drain and safety precautions, things she sure they both know but _willingly don’t pay attention to!_

.x.

The storm breaks in the middle of Keith being trapped in Katie’s house, so by the time he has access to the news it’s already been gone over a dozen times – _Galran nation sends ‘healing rain’ to support new crops in Altean-Human nation_ is the party-line.

There are sceptics, of course, but the longer the light, healing drizzle lasts the less traction they have.

Keith stands under it, palms up, and watches the droplets bounce off of his new, skin-tight shield, fascinated. Their magic – Katie, Shiro’s and his – is still almost entirely beyond comprehension, but there are several things Keith knows for sure.

First, the shield never leaves, and repels all magic that’s not his. He’s working on refining it to accept healing magics from other people, but he’s not as worried as he could be, all things considered.

Second, he can summon the Marmoran blade from the combined runes on his arm, and when he has it he can draw the paradigm that releases his disguise, allowing him to walk around as a Galran in places that are safe.

Thirdly, the ability to read emotions is only an augmentation of his natural emotional magic – which had been on the fritz for weeks after the casting, and has only recently been back under his control, thanks to unending hours of practice in Katie’s basement.

Fourthly, the restraints from the original transmutation are gone, apparently for good. There’s no division between himself and his magic now, no emotionless gap he has to cross, or a place where he has to compartmentalize. He doesn’t feel _tied down_ to being human or the limitations that had been put on him through the first transmutation, and it’s like breathing for the first time in years.

And lastly, for some reason, his magic is linked in with the magic of Shiro’s new arm. He can locate it in his mind even across town, which is how he knows that Shiro is the one coming up behind him and hugging his waist, even though Keith’s eyes are on the sky.

“Missing home?” Shiro asks, resting his chin on Keith’s shoulder. The water doesn’t bounce of Shiro like it does Keith, so the Altean is already damp.

“Yeah.” And it’s easier to say, now, to admit that somewhere else is home, and that he wants to be there, even if he can’t remember it. But…

He turns, leading Shiro back under the Holt’s porch. They’re at Katie’s, waiting for Matt to return from his three-and-a-half-month trip across two continents and an ocean, eager to hear his story and share theirs.

“But it’s not so bad, here.” Keith says, and sits on Katie’s porch swing, Shiro at his side.

Shiro smiles, leaning against him and wrapping his new, Galra-Altean arm around Keith’s shoulders. It glows a muted navy, unactivated, and Keith watches little dots of colored light move through it, clustered together in new constellations. It’s the only semi-foreign magic that doesn’t slide off Keith’s skin now, and he rubs his cheek against the bend in Shiro’s elbow, breathing out.

The rain isn’t supposed to let up for another hour or so, and Keith is content to wait outside while Katie, Lance and Hunk tear apart the inside of the house in preparation for Matt’s return. They don’t know if he’s teleporting in or not, and it’s put all three of them into a space of frantic energy, eager to clean and set up decorations.

“You don’t want to go in and help?” Shiro asks, and Keith turns to him with a knowing look, making the other man laugh. Neither of them want to get in the way of Katie and her troops spreading glitter traps and colored chalk bombs all over the house, hidden in otherwise innocuous decorations. Matt’s been gone a long time, and Katie is, understandably, pretty pissed off that he just up and left without so much as a warning, only letting her know he’d be gone a while once he already was.

“I’d like to not have to shower twice today, if you don’t mind.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Shiro’s eyes heat and his lashes come down, and the hand of his magical arm comes up to caress Keith’s jaw. He moves closer along the swing, crowding into Keith’s space, making him intimately aware of Shiro’s body pressed against his.

“Are you sure?” Shiro asks, his lips ghosting across Keith’s cheek. His opposite hand rests on Keith’s thigh, and Keith, invested in putting up a fight only so as to prolong the tension, puts his hands on Shiro’s chest, more touching than pushing.

“Are you going to persuade me otherwise?” He asks, tilting his chin up in challenge. He likes the way Shiro’s smile gets a touch predatory, the way his fingers ghost along Keith’s neck and the inseam of his pants, how Shiro bares in on him, a heavy, demanding weight –

“Well this is nice.” Matt says, leaning up against the railing. Shiro and Keith jump apart with a yelp neither of them will own up to, later. Matt looks on innocently, blinking behind his glasses. One of the lenses is cracked at the corner, and there’s dust all over him, turning him a murky grey where the rain hits.

“Just getting frisky on my porch, huh? No shame?” He nods, making a moue of understanding. “Cool, cool, I dig it. But if my sister sees anything she shouldn’t, I’ll be removing somethings _I_ shouldn’t, ya feel?” His smile is sinister on his face, and both Shiro and Keith nod without breaking eye contact.

“Alright!” Matt exclaims, standing up and dusting off his hands to ill effect. “Time to see what Squirt and the Goofs have cooked up for my return. Don’t wait up!” He winks as he says it, but Keith can’t bring himself to do anything but nod politely back, smile fixed on his face.

Shiro sags against him once Matt has gone inside, one hand pressed over his eyes. “I forgot how terrifying Matt was. Fuck.” He laughs, a little desperately.

Keith just nods, listening intently. There aren’t any screams yet –

“ _MATT YOU FUCK!_ ”

-but Keith doesn’t have to wait too long for that, either.

“Wanna just stay out here?” He asks, looking imploringly at Shiro. The noise in the house increases exponentially in the next ten seconds – excited screaming, glass shattering, spells being cast, Matt’s voice going _Not in my house!_ and laughing hysterically - and it’s only after Keith casts a noise-shield that he can even hear Shiro’s answer.

“With you? Always.”

Keith gives him a five second warning before tackling him back onto the swing cushions, swallowing Shiro’s laughter and, later, his gasps and moans too.


End file.
